You’d think that the largest single day of protests in American history would draw wall-to-wall coverage from the mainstream media for days.

After all, they never miss a chance to remind us how much they “love democracy”—and how they, more than anyone, are its ultimate defenders.

But when seven million Americans poured into the streets across thousands of cities to declare—forcefully but peacefully—that this country will bow to no monarch, those self-appointed guardians of democracy suddenly fell silent.

Aside from a few perfunctory updates on CNN’s dreadful weekend show and a handful of terse wire stories, the demonstrations had all but vanished from their rundowns and websites by Monday morning.

Apparently, a missing necklace at the Louvre is more newsworthy to America’s fourth estate than a nationwide uprising against fascism.

But why? The answer is twofold, and it reveals an uncomfortable truth about the system we’re living under.

Despite what the reactionary right likes to scream, the mainstream media’s biggest bias isn’t left or right—it’s toward money.

At their core, America’s largest news organizations are businesses, not public institutions. Their shareholders demand quarterly growth, not democratic accountability. In this environment, the logic of journalism bends toward what sells.

And as I experienced in my career, working for both ABC News and NBC News, this expectation is not a conspiracy, nor is it a direct order.

Any producer in TV news knows that if they don’t deliver an audience, their ass is on the line. This was true when I was a producer at Good Morning America, and it’s even more true now.

This pressure is structural. Reporters quickly learn that important stories—stories that challenge power—rarely get clicks. Sensational ones do. Those clicks fund salaries, bonuses, and investors’ returns. Fail to deliver them, and you’re out of a job.

This dynamic has a name. Leftist thinker Noam Chomsky called this phenomenon “manufacturing consent”—the way media organizations internalize the interests of their powerful owners without explicit directives, simply by operating within the constraints of a profit-driven system.

Peaceful demonstrations demanding accountability and democratic principles—no matter how massive—don’t pull the guaranteed audience a juicier story might.

(It’s the same reason so much of cable news is not so much news as people just yelling at one another. The news is boring—debate is theater.)

The bosses demand an audience, so producers and reporters chase stories that are guaranteed to drive eyeballs. A grisly, unsolved murder will. A mass mobilization? That’s a gamble.

But there’s a deeper, more insidious reason the No Kings protests were a short-lived story. At its core, the movement is confronting the fascist takeover of the American government.

And when push comes to shove, capitalists will always protect fascists, because fascists protect profits.

There’s a real, palpable anger in America right now. Some 60 percent of our citizens live paycheck to paycheck in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.

Virtually everybody has donated to a GoFundMe for a friend or relative’s cancer treatment or loved one’s funeral. Meanwhile the mega rich buy bigger and bigger yachts, amassing fortunes they couldn’t spend if they lived a thousand lifetimes.

Trump and Fox News have tapped into this anger created by late-stage capitalism and redirected it away from the system that is crushing us toward scapegoats—poor people of color, migrant workers, trans kids, anyone but the system that has literally enslaved us.

This is fascism’s essential function under capitalism. When people start to recognize that the system itself is rigged, when they begin demanding change—fascism steps in on behalf of the super wealthy, to either redirect that anger or violently suppress those who refuse to be deceived.

The No Kings protests are a direct challenge to fascist redirection.

Seven million people in the streets saying “no” to concentrated power is dangerous because it might awaken people to the deeper truth that our entire economic system is built on the concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands.

So the media, owned by the very billionaires whose wealth depends on maintaining this system, cannot amplify a movement that threatens to unite working people against their oppressors.

They can’t celebrate resistance against fascism when fascism functions as capitalism’s pressure valve—the tool that keeps justified rage aimed anywhere but up.

The silence becomes strategic. That’s why the same media executives and millionaire anchormen who cheer “freedom of the press” suddenly grow timid when millions take to the streets demanding real democracy. Their loyalty isn’t to the people. It’s to the system that signs their checks.

But here’s the good news. This isn’t 1972 or even 1996—there aren’t three channels anymore. There’s a way around the capitalist gatekeepers.

Despite the fact the No Kings protests have disappeared from the evening news and the morning paper, millions of people’s social media feeds have been flooded with videos and photos and reports of the historic march.

Ordinary people with smartphones documented what the professionals ignored. Organizers shared their own narratives. Participants told their own stories, unfiltered by corporate editors deciding what’s “newsworthy” based on profit margins.

This is a crack in the system that didn’t exist a generation ago. The mainstream media can bury a story, but they can no longer kill it entirely.

When seven million people march, seven million people have friends, family, coworkers—networks that spread beyond the reach of any news director’s red pen.

The challenge now is to build on this. To recognize that if the traditional media won’t cover mass democratic movements, we need to create and support independent outlets that will. To understand that every share, every repost, every conversation about what really happened is an act of resistance against manufactured silence.

The capitalists who own the news can ignore us—but they can’t erase us. Not anymore. The seven million who marched proved the people still have power—and the media’s panicked attempt to memory-hole the biggest act of public dissent in modern U.S. history only shows how much that power terrifies them.

The question is: what will we do with it?