Sunday, May 25, 2008

July Sunday News Article "Propaganda"

I unexpectedly stumbled onto some extremely significant information regarding a past Sunday News propaganda piece supporting the hotel and convention center project.

On Sunday, July 22, 2006, the Lancaster Sunday News printed an article titled "Sun shines bright on KY city" and sub-titled "Lancaster's effort for a convention center mirrored in Covington". This article went on to describe a successful convention center in Covington, KY, a city about the size of Lancaster that just happens to be directly across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati, Ohio.

As was noted at the time the article was published, Covington's convention center is an easy walk across a bridge from downtown Cincinnati....

Cincinnati does have a convention center. In 2001, vicious race riots broke out in the area immediately surrounding the Cincinnati convention center as a result of a number of black residents being killed by white police officers. According to Wikipedia, to this day the level of violence in Cincinnati remains high.

The race riots were followed by an organized boycott of Cincinnati downtown businesses, which is still in effect. This boycott specifically includes the convention center.

As a result, many of the conventions which would otherwise have scheduled an event in Cincinnati have relocated to the Northern Kentucky Convention Center in Covington, which is less than a mile and a half from the Cincinnati convention center.

I was also told there is grossly insufficient parking in the immediate area of the Cincinnati convention center. But the Covington convention center has a large parking garage immediately adjacent to the facility, along with hundreds of parking spaces on surface lots surrounding the convention center.

This information paints the Sunday News propaganda story in an entirely different light.