Tenderly They Report

What are we supposed to do when the media refuses, for what can only be politically correct reasons rooted in fear, to report the facts of an important story, leaving the reader to guess at what's actually happening?

Take the riots in Paris (more here), which have been going on for a week now. Didn't know? You aren't alone; it's largely a non-story for the mainstream media, even though it's affecting one of the world's great cities and a nation's capital.

Why? Because it appears that the mainstream media is uncomfortable reporting that ethnic Muslim North Africans, living in what are basically ghettos ringing Paris, have finally exploded their simmering, long-held anger into violence. France is happy to have them do the crap jobs at very low wages, but doesn't want to integrate them into larger French society. Instead, the immigrants and their children are kept bottled up in substandard communities.

Sound like anywhere you know?

So why the reticence? Well, take a look at how the mainstream media handles reporting on Muslim / Arabic issues here at home. Or how they handle racial riot situations like regularly have been occuring in Ohio in the past few years.

One blogger offers some cogent observations regarding the mainstream media, explosive events and bloggers' role in reporting and commentary:

At this juncture, I think I have to just throw up my hands in surrender. I have no idea if the rioters are Moslems, whether that's one reason they're rioting, whether it has anything to do with the headscarf law, and what is the significance of the fact, solemnly chronicled by Gateway Pundit, that the neighborhood just opened up their first halal (Moslem-kosher) Burger King.

The sad and simple fact is that when the basic news conveyers -- the mainstream media -- conspire to withhold key facts from the readers, there is often no way of reliably getting that information. As much as we may hate it, the fact is that we are still, several years into the blogger revolution, utterly dependent upon exactly the people we hope to supplant. This is not a good sign.

He touches briefly on the idea of a seamless reporting hierarchy: citizen-journalists, news bloggers, news aggregators, mainstream media, pundit bloggers, newspaper columnists. I think this is where news reporting is moving, ultimately. But it will require lots of people with digital cameras and phones, ubiquitous wifi and broadband, etc.

It's coming.

INSTANT UPDATE: Ah, here we go. This is from August 2002, but it still seems piercingly relevant to the above.

BTW, the City Journal is an excellent magazine. It always rewards readers.