It simply asked why the Herald ''blatantly ignored'' the marches and ponders why this was so, when the protest was such a big hit on social media. Pembroke says that because of its oversight, the Herald will be in the ''sin bin'' for a while. Illustration: michaelmucci.com ''We figure your news team would search social media TRENDS for new content ideas? You must have noticed the fuss?'' he writes. The Herald didn't blatantly ignore the protest, it sent a reporter along to cover it, and that reporter was me. I wrote a small (and, in hindsight, rather sniffy and unkind) report about it which ran on our website. But the editors did not include the story in Monday's paper.

When I rang the national convener of the rallies on Sunday, he told me more than 100,000 people had turned up to march all around Australia. He told me those numbers were ''confirmed'' and when I asked by whom, he launched into a speech about how his group was used to being overlooked by the ''MSM'' (mainstream media) and talked about the MSM being a puppet of the establishment. It is strange that people who despise the MSM so much are so angry at being ignored by it. This week the paper received letters from people involved in the march asking why it wasn't covered, one of which was published. I was abused on Twitter for my online story, and also for the fact that it didn't run in the paper. I was criticised for comparing the protest to the infamous anti-carbon tax rallies against the Gillard government. Like many journalists, I am used to Twitter abuse, and I find it deeply unpleasant. Having been abused by both mad lefties and mad right-wingers, I know that each can be as uncivil as the other - a point which was borne out by the nasty signs at the March in March protests, which mirrored the nasty signs at the ''Convoy of No Confidence'' rallies of 2011. There were signs with Tony Abbott's head transposed on a penis, there was a sign calling him a ''f---wit'' and one of the speakers at the Sydney rally referred on stage to the ''shameful, racist, homophobic … f---ing a---hole that is Tony Abbott''. Even though they were offended by the comparison when I made it, many of the Twitter/internet critics complained that while the ''Convoy of No Confidence'' rallies got plenty of coverage in the traditional media, their left-wing protest didn't. These people overlooked a few key facts - those right-wing protests got largely negative coverage, and many of the participants complained of bias in that coverage. Also, those protests were of greater news value due to the attendance of Coalition MPs and senators, including the future Prime Minister, who famously stood next to a crude sign about Julia Gillard.

Their presence lent legitimacy to a ragtag bunch of extremists, homophobes, nutters and anti-carbon tax protesters who should never have been given any. That became the story, particularly because the atmosphere of the last Parliament was so precarious and febrile. The comparisons are valid to a point. Both protest movements grew out of grass-roots campaigns, both reflected a vein of strong anger in the community and both included vitriolic elements which deflected from their message. But the left is far better than the right at mobilising people to the streets. It is better at community organising and grassroots campaigns. Last Sunday's protests attracted thousands of marchers, compared with the paltry amount of people who turned up to the carbon tax campaigns (remember how Alan Jones, enraged by the poor showing, claimed that hordes of would-be attendees had been stopped at the ACT-NSW border? Adorable!). The lack of coverage of March in March probably had something to do with the fact that, like so much left-wing protest, it was unfocused. The speakers and protesters had a grab-bag of complaints, from asylum-seeker policy to gay marriage to fair trade. The only uniting theme was raw hatred of the Prime Minister, and the offensive signs/language about him were off-putting to a broader audience. The whole thing was interesting because it demonstrated the widening gulf between what is popular on social media and the internet, and what traditional media organisations consider newsworthy.

Sometimes the two overlap, but whether the bloggers, tweeters and other internet denizens like it or not, newspapers still get to make that call. Newspapers, edited as they are by humans, do get it wrong, and the Herald should have covered the marches. Contemporary newsrooms have constrained resources, papers have fewer pages due to declining advertising, and the increasing clutter of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle makes news selection confusing. But the left does itself no favours if it resorts to insult, vitriol, and mad muttering in dark corners of the internet. It does much better if it communicates with sense and civility, like Timothy Pembroke, who I hope will keep buying the Herald even though we disappointed him this once.