Last week’s headline in the New York Times was obfuscating: “In the UK, a Violent Cycle: Hateful Attacks, Right-Wing Agitation and Riots.” Because hatred is now irrevocably associated with the “right-wing,” innocent American newspaper readers will have presumed that these agitating, rioting reactionaries were also the authors of the “hateful attacks.”

The New York Times and the PBS News Hour delivered such twisted, incomplete and minimized versions of recent incendiary events in the UK that I was obliged to tell the stories of Henry Nowak and Stephen Ogilvie to more than one ordinarily up-to-date American friend, because the salient details had been omitted from left-leaning reports. My friends’ news sources had left the hazy impression that ructions on the streets of Southampton and Belfast were simply the “right-wing” creating mayhem for the sake of it, because that’s what the “right-wing” do. This was merely more Brexity hatefulness.

Under the misleadingly neutral-sounding heading “News Analysis,” which routinely allows opinion pieces to masquerade as straight reporting, this NYT journalist glossed over the particulars of both stories that had roused such British consternation.

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The snidely dismissive police response to Nowak’s entreaty that he’d been stabbed – “I don’t think you have, mate” – conspicuously fails to feature in this recap. The way the Sikh murderer connivingly played the race card, convincing police that he was the one........

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