It’s true that the media have always, well, mediated the truth for readers and viewers. National and international news outlets came into being because no one person can figure out what’s going on in his own city, much less the nation or the world. Serving the media consumer’s needs necessarily involves shaping the daily pile of news into relatively compact and, yes, interesting narratives.

Yet a clear line distinguishes this legitimate task (of curating and framing) from Pravda­-style propagandizing in behalf of power and powerful ideologies. The American corporate media crossed that line a long time ago; the shameless, support-the-D.C.-consensus-at-all-costs drum-beating for the Iraq War was an early transgression.

Today’s race-narrativizing is next-level stuff, as the kids say. It reminds me of nothing so much as how European media cover crimes and terror attacks committed by recent migrants from the Middle East and North Africa: You often don’t learn that the perp was a migrant until the last few paragraphs of the story—if at all. Open borders are a priority for Europe’s ruling classes, and so reporters and editors airbrush, say, the inconvenient fact of women raped by “asylum-seekers” in Munich.

“Following the story wherever it takes you”? Yeah, not anymore.