Bush go home on the TV tonight

Having failed to make it to the demonstration against GW Bush's state visit to London, we watched it on the TV.

The British TV coverage communicated the huge significance of tens of thousands of people (of all backgrounds and nationalities) out on the streets demonstrating for peace. For the first time that I can remember the protests received coverage proportional to its political significance; I attended the march to stop the war against Iraq in September 2002, alongside 400,000 other protesters; this event was largely ignored by the mainstream news media.

The TV news still failed to fully reflect the complexity, subtlety and intelligence of demonstrators' motivations. But it was a start.

For the hour that we watched CNN it never directly refered to the demonstration. It did show Bush and Blair, shoulder to shoulder at a press conference in a disgusting show of double speak and evasion. They blithely dismissed the demonstrations as an endorsement of the democracy that they are supposedly struggling to bring to the people of Iraq whilst making it clear that they had no interest in listening to any of the protesters' concerns.

Most of the CNN coverage was dedicated to the horrific bombings in Turkey carried out by Al Qaeda suicide bombers; endless pictures of dismembered, panicking and bleeding victims scrabbling though rubble. At last count 27 people were killed, 400 injured.

It struck me that in an hour of broadcast time CNN had privelidged the actions of 2 small cells of violent 'terrorists' over the coordinated peacefully motivated actions of 110,000 'friends of America' in London.