The Airbrush Is Mightier than the Word

The airbrush, as Mark Steyn wrote nearly a decade ago, is mightier than the sword. Steyn was writing in reference to a Canadian piece that tried strenuously to airbrush out every pertinent detail of a report on two Muslims who murdered 11 Charlie Hebdo writers and artists and their accomplices who murdered a policewoman and four Jews at a kosher supermarket. The Muslim killers were described instead as ‘French-born brothers’ and their Jewish victims as anonymous ‘hostages’.

Far from chastened, the mainstream media have doubled down. At every point they lie by omission when it suits their agenda. Gangs of machete-wielding Africans become ‘youths’, rampaging far-left riots become ‘mostly peaceful demonstrations’. A particular corker in that regard is a recent MSNBC talking head who shrieked that the violent riots in LA are ‘confined mostly to a one mile area of a 500 square mile city’. To which we might respond that the unrest on Jan 6 only occurred in four acres of a 68 square mile city. Or that only two per cent of LA County burned in the Palisades Fires, so why were all the rich celebs being such Drama Queens?

But when it comes to lying by omission, few can hold a candle to the BBC. This is, after all, the ‘news’ organisation that has managed to almost completely ignore the industrial-scale pack rape of little white girls in Britain for decades by gangs of Muslim men. The same taxpayer-funded propagandists hid almost every pertinent detail about the murderer of little girls at a dance party in Liverpool.

They’re at it again.

Does anyone know what’s actually happening in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland? If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s actually quite hard to work out what has led to the violence which has injured at least 32 police officers.

All the BBC will report is that local youths were rioting over a sexual attack on a girl, and that two teenage boys were in custody. The only real clue was a mention that ‘police condemned the riots as racist thuggery’.

If, as I suspect, your bullshit radar has become finely attuned to what the MSM aren’t saying, you’ve probably figured it out. Especially as, with a palpable sense of being dragged kicking and screaming, the BBC finally let slip more telling details.

We found out that the rioters were still rioting. A local MP popped up on the news to say that people were unsettled by the number of immigrants in the area. And the BBC informed us that the 14-year-old youths – who deny sexual assault – confirmed their names and ages through a Romanian interpreter at Coleraine Magistrates’ Court.

So, why didn’t the BBC just come right out and say that two Romanian immigrants have been arrested for raping a girl?

Because they’re dedicated liars and they have plenty of form.

The Dublin riots in 2023 happened after an Algerian was charged with stabbing a school assistant and three children, seriously injuring a five-year-old girl. But the authorities – and the news – carefully glossed over the bad-taste question of the background of the alleged attacker; social media inevitably filled the vacuum, which is precisely why the riots had an anti-immigrant aspect. Riad Bouchaker is yet to stand trial and denies the charges.

Won’t state broadcasters ever learn that not telling us things isn’t helpful? People work things out for themselves. And if they’re not told clearly by the BBC, or whoever, what the background is of the alleged perpetrators in these cases, well, the public is going to arrive at its own conclusions.

Which is what happened in the wake of the horrific attack in Liverpool. The police, media and politicians were hiding something and everyone knew it. So, people filled in the gaps themselves. Then the same people who’ve repeatedly lied by omission accuse everyone else of ‘misinformation’.

The sense that elements of a story are being kept from us for our own good – that is, lest people get angry about it – only adds to the idea that we’re not really grown up enough to be trusted with the truth. It’s not a great way to calm things down, you know.

The more they lie, the more people know they’re being lied to. In the end, nobody believes anything they say, if they were foolish enough to even do so from the start.