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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

It was the largest demonstration Madison, Wisconsin has seen since Vietnam. Over 100,000 people took to the freezing streets on Saturday to continue expressing their opposition to Republican Governor Scott Walker’s plan to strip most of the state’s unionized public workers of their collective bargaining rights.

In a remarkable sign of solidarity on Friday, hundreds of cops who’ve been exempted from the plan defied Governor Walker’s 4 p.m. evacuation deadline by joining the demonstrators inside the Capitol.

Jim Palmer, executive director of the 11,000-member Wisconsin Professional Police Association, said, “Law enforcement officers know the difference between right and wrong, and Governor Walker’s attempt to eliminate the collective voice of Wisconsin’s devoted public employees is wrong. That is why we have stood with our fellow employees each day and why we will be sleeping among them tonight.”

Cops joining demonstrators? Police associations tend to be fairly conservative and now they’re defying orders to join the demonstrators? You would think this would make major headlines, but the events were completely ignored by ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press.

Jake Tapper hosted This Week’s roundtable conversation about budget cuts with two Republican and two Democratic governors. He failed to even mention what happened on the ground in Wisconsin.

And on NBC’s Meet the Press, before a softball interview with Governor Walker, David Gregory said, “Protests grew in Madison, Wisconsin Saturday after days of demonstrations there by pro-labor supporters.” Can you imagine if a police force joined a tea party rally? It would lead every national newscast in this country.

PoliticusUSA reports that MSNBC’s coverage of Saturday’s massive rally was disappointing; CNN’s was scant; and Fox News’s was non-existent.

Organizers of Saturday’s solidarity rallies said 50,000 people took to the streets of almost every single capital in the country to demand an end to the attacks on workers and cuts to vital services.

Those rallies received local and national print media coverage, but very little television coverage.

Also on Saturday, Walk for Choice rallies took place in at least 40 cities across the country, including Savannah, Georgia, Gainesville, Florida, and Greensboro, North Carolina. The Walk for Choice rally in Chicago passed the solidarity with Wisconsin rally. Pro-choice advocates took to the streets to express their support for reproductive rights and to raise awareness about the recent House vote to bar federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other anti-choice legislation at the national and state levels. Other than local media coverage, these rallies received hardly any attention in the alternative or national press.

Also on Saturday, US Uncut debuted with nationwide protests to call attention to tax dodgers. Demonstrations took place inside and outside of 50 Bank of America branches across the country.

In Washington DC, about 100 Uncut demonstrators shut down the B of A branch.

At the rally in Portland, Oregon, Anna Becker said, “I have been waiting for 20 years for something like this to happen in America.”

But other than coverage in the independent media, US Uncut failed to receive the coverage it deserved in the corporate media.

The next large action is planned for Tax Day on April 15. For more information, visit, US Uncut.org

I’m Rose Aguilar for Uprising.