Or as our Republican-owned local media framed it: "Minneapolis Motorists Don't Like to Wait a Few Minutes at an Intersection". . . Huh?
The little news coverage given in the Twin Cities to the five year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War seems to be turning out a bit biased. Notably, with nary a word about the nearly 4,000 U.S. military troops who've died in Iraq, the total cost of the war now estimated to go as high as $3 trillion, nor anything about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women and children who've been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion five years ago, the Twin Cities' KSTP (ABC TV affiliate) owned by Republican backer Stanley Hubbard completely twisted their news story by making big points of interviewing motorists that were stopped a few minutes waiting for Saturday's peace marchers to get through an intersection.
If traffic matters so much, why did Hubbard's TV crew fail to interview any of the thousands of motorists who had to stop for hours during rush hour last August 2007 when War President Bush's motorcade closed down whole sections of the freeway as it made its way across the Twin Cities to and from a political fundraiser for Republican Senator Norm Coleman?
No, as they used to say in the FBI, follow the money. Follow the money behind this type of reporting and you'll find KSTP owner Stanley Hubbard has, in the last few years, donated somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 to Republican politicians, including $17,500 to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. No wonder KSTP twists their coverage of the Iraq War and our marches for peace.
If you have a discerning, critical eye, you will also detect the subtle bias that can be injected even through photography. The one below by Star Tribune photographer Joey McLeister is of the same peace march, at almost the same location, but taken from a different angle, which makes the peace parade look much smaller than the one at top.
So taking away all the media spin, it's perhaps not as clear as the KSTP-TV reporter would have us think as to how this all bodes for the upcoming Republican National Convention here!