Why does the MSM Downplay the Violence at Left-Wing Protests?

I think you and I know both know the reason why, but still, don’t miss A. Barton Hinkle’s new article at Reason on the topic, an excellent successor to Jesse Walker’s essay there on “The Paranoid Center” from 2009. Hinkle writes:

Boy, those sure have been some mighty peaceful protests against government budget cuts in Greece, haven’t they? You bet they have—at least if you ignore the rock-throwing, fire-setting, window-smashing, and blood-spilling.

Which, it seems clear, a lot of major news organs would like to do. According to one story in The Wall Street Journal, the demonstrations “began peacefully.” According to another, last week Constitution Square in Athens “seethed with indignant, but peaceful, demonstrators.”

“The day began noisily but peacefully,” intoned The New York Times on Wednesday. The Washington Post likewise observed that “a peaceful protest . . . quickly degenerated into violence.” Reuters reported that, regardless of “clashes between stone-throwing masked youths and riot police . . . thousands of peaceful protesters demonstrated against the austerity plan.”

Sure, blood was spilled. But don’t blame the protesters. As the Journal reported, it was Greece’s parliament that approved a “widely hated austerity package” despite “the best efforts of peaceful grass-roots activists., megaphone-touting [sic] labor unionists, and stone-throwing anarchists.”

This is a sharp contrast from how, say, Tea Party protests against the passage of ObamaCare were treated.

Read the whole thing — and note the paradox within the WSJ story quoted above — why would self-described anarchists hate a government “austerity package?”