"Youths" riot, France burns- but newspaper editors are kept in line

The media in France are somewhat notorious for playing down the riots and arson attacks that plague their inner cities- the rioters, almost universally North African migrants, are "youths", and their reason for rioting is not hatred of France, nor is it racism- it is "disenfanchisement" and, well, "racism", but apparently it's us who are the racists. You know, racism of the sort you didn't know you were perpetrating until some youth burns your car.

That said, they were not afraid to release the facts and figures, which, taken aside from the loving descriptions of the bold young revolutionaries, made for alarming reading.

Well, it seems peace and quiet reign supreme in the streets of Paris and Marseilles tonight. The reason? A bold new directive from the French government. Did they deploy the "gendarmes"? Did they arrest ringleaders? Did they turn on the water cannon?

No, all those are too difficult. The media might report crime statistics, and people might draw distinctly non-PC conclusions from them. So withhold crime statistics! Yes, the French government, in a perhaps typical gesture of surrender, has ordered local authorities to refuse to issue crime figures to the press. Le Monde has carried an article, in which it is alleged that calls from that paper and others to local prefectures has resulted in a flat refusal to disclose crime figures, with "orders" beign offered by way of justification.

The French are by no means the only Western government busily engaged in papering over the all-too-obvious cracks in the so-called multicultural society. This, however, represents a step further- with the media slowly starting to stir over the people's outrage that led to the Left's disastrous showing in the Euro elections, and the growing tide of resentment against enforced multiculturalism, the French government have decided that the media, and naturally the people, are not to be trusted with the truth.