New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister, in a discussion with Chris Hayes and organizer Linda Sarsour, asked why the women's marches got so little media coverage.
"What do you want me to tell the crazy women talking about justice? They ignored us again but they will not ignore us at the ballot box," Sarsour said.
"This is right. This is symptomatic, the marches and the activism is not taken seriously. Why?" Traister asked.
"They are women's marches. We know last year single biggest one-day demonstration in this country's history, we heard how afterwards, it was okay but just a march, it's performance, fun, people get together and wear their cute hats, whatever. No one seems to have connected, still, a year later when there is a spontaneous demonstration almost the same size in some places like Chicago, bigger, without a centralized organization drawing everybody.
"I didn't know about the marches," she said. "I write about women and politics. I didn't know there would be women's marches until January and they were massive. They don't just have cute marches with the hats with the fact it's women clogging congressional phone lines and doing town halls, who have been organizing on the grassroots activist level around state and local office races around the country who have been winning in New Jersey, in Virginia and who are running in unprecedented numbers for the House, for the Senate and primarying Democrats from the left.
"And apparently, the media's failure to take this seriously as a political movement and not as some social weekend thing that women do once a year, has led Senate Democrats to think it's not a serious political movement," she said.
Later in the show, she compared them with the endless coverage sparked by the much smaller Tea Party and how the media helped make them a political force.
