Great rally brings MediaFail

On Friday, I attended the rally outside Western & Southern in Cincinnati where we protested against the financial service giant's bullying of the women of the Anna Louise Inn. The event wasn't organized by Occupy, but Occupy folks were face-deep in attendance. In all, about 300 people showed up.

I'll at least give The Media credit for covering it more than they've covered any local Occupy event in months. Channel 9 was on hand, and CityBeat covered it before the fact. But I didn't see any other media there - even though the local press endlessly hyped the Tea Party's Day of Resistance garbage a couple weeks ago.

Channel 12 - called WKRC-TV by those in the know - was particularly disappointing. Channel 12 was recently taken over by the far-right Sinclair syndicate - a takeover that was rubber-stamped by the FCC, of course! It shows. I watched Channel 12's news in the hopes they'd covered the rally, but instead, here's a partial list of stories covered in that hour of news:

• Local college sports teams switching conferences. This was their top story, believe it or not.

• A run-of-the-mill high school basketball game. This too was covered within the first 12 minutes.

• A point-by-point rehashing of talking points about the federal budget sequester. This piece - which looked like it was produced by Sinclair's central propaganda ministry - repeated each right-wing lie one by one, as it absurdly denied that the sequester would contribute to the austerity-fueled recession.

• How nobody likes caffeinated chewing gum, because it tastes like shit.

• Justin Bieber's troubles.

The local media is as bad as the national media that invites Jeb Bush on every single Sunday talk show.