"'Tis The Restive Season!"

Mark Steyn spots the AP giving the flaming “youth” of France yet another new euphemism:

Restive Youths Burn Cars In New Suburban Unrest

BAGNOLET, France – Restive youths in a Paris suburb torched a tourist bus and nearly a half-dozen cars and hurled objects at police early Tuesday, a night after fullblown unrest prompted by the death of a teen fleeing police.

As Mark adds, “Seems clear enough. Restive youths provoked by arrestive police lead to unrestive suburbs.”

John Hinderaker adds:

Presumably the Associated Press assumes we all know who these “suburban” youths are, and they don’t need to belabor the point. They’re probably right. Still, there is something odd about a world in which it is commonly understood that the function of a news service is to filter, rather than simply report, the news.

Not at all — that’s the needle that threads the otherwise paradoxical postmodern legacy media, as I wrote last fall, linking to Tom Wolfe’s “journalists as Victorian Gentlemen” thesis:

Just as it was in 1963, the legacy media’s primary role in its twilight years as gatekeeper is to keep news out. Unlike back then, it’s not because there isn’t enough time or space to report it (bandwidth on the Internet being infinite), but to protect their friends, colleagues, political constituency and their ideology as a whole.

It’s pretty obvious whom AP is rooting for in the festive French Car-B-Q wars, and it’s not the French government, or, heaven forfend, the property owner who’s just watched his Citroen go up in a sea of festive flames.