Matt notes that the Jena 6 protests have made him more aware of the situation. While I share his general skepticism about mass protest as an effective political tool, I think this is one of the cases in which it can be particularly effective. When thousands of people are going somewhere and making a lot of noise, the cameras follow. In this case, you have a situation where an injustice occurred, and without a bunch of people going to Louisiana and making noise, there wouldn't be enough media attention on what happened in Jena and on the larger issue of systemic racism.
Mass protest is a less effective tool when you're dealing with a situation that has already attracted lots of media coverage, like the Iraq War. It wasn't that Iraq was ever undercovered -- it was just that early coverage of the war was massively skewed by administration propaganda. Partly because of the massive investment Republicans have made in making the public dismiss protestors as dirty hippies whom right-thinking people shouldn't take seriously, it's hard for mass protests to change the nature of already existing media coverage for the better.
