A week after its TV ad first appeared on the news, MoveOn.org reported that its membership had grown by 100,000. The ad was covered on virtually every major network. It was shown and discussed on news programs in Australia, Pakistan, Russia and Japan. The tally is ongoing, but the ad generated at least 110 television news stories and dozens in print, according to an Interim Media Coverage Report by Fenton Communications." It also attempted to place anti-war advertisements on the sides of buildings, billboards and buses but was thwarted when Viacom, which owns the largest outdoor-advertising entity in North America, refused to run the ads. By early 2003, MoveOn boasted more than 750,000 members in the United States and hundreds of thousands more overseas. As war in Iraq neared, its member base grew and the pace of its activities accelerated. Whereas the Nexis/Lexis news database recorded 155 mentions of MoveOn in 2002, in 2003 there were 2,226 mentions. In January 2003, more than 9,000 of its members, organized into small delegations, visited more than 400 home offices of U.S. senators and representatives across the nation to present the petitions in person. In February 2003, MoveOn teamed up with Win Without War to sponsor a "virtual march on Washington" that generated more than 1 million phone calls and faxes to politicians opposing the invasion. In June 2003, two months after the Pentagon declared an end to "major combat operations in Iraq," MoveOn teamed up again with Win Without War to purchase a full-page ad in the "New York Times" that labeled Bush a "misleader" and demanded an independent commission to determine the truth about US intelligence on Iraq, declaring, "It would be a tragedy if young men and women were sent to die for a lie." In 2007, MoveOn organized the anti-war lobbying coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq. In June 2003, MoveOn held what it called "the first online primary of the modern age," and Howard Dean won a plurality of 44 percent of the vote, with 139,360 votes. The methodology of the primary, however, attracted criticism from a staff member of the Richard A. "Dick" Gephardt campaign, who complained of "vote-rigging" because only three of the Democratic primary candidates—Dean, John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich—had been invited to send detailed messages to MoveOn members in advance of the online voting. MoveOn called the Gephardt charge "absurd," stating that Dean, Kerry and Kucinich "were chosen by MoveOn members" and that their candidate emails included "links to the sites of ALL the other 6 candidates. ...