Above, a British police officer works to keep the vibrancy from getting out of hand in Leicester.

One of the frequent themes of this blog is that the news media exist primarily not to report the news, but to manage the Narrative. This from the BBC is a perfect example:

Police and community leaders have called for calm after large numbers of people became involved in disorder in parts of East Leicester.

Footage online shows hundreds of people, mainly men, filling the streets on Saturday evening.

It is the latest in a series of disturbances to have broken out following an India and Pakistan cricket match on 28 August.

A significant police operation will remain in the area in the coming days.

Speaking on Saturday night, Leicestershire Police's temporary chief constable Rob Nixon said in a video: "We've had numerous reports of an outbreak of disorder in parts of the East Leicester area of the city.

"We have got officers there, we are taking control of that situation, there are additional officers that are en route, and dispersal powers and stop and search powers have been authorised.

"Please do not get involved, we are calling for calm."

Community leaders from East Leicester were on the ground with officers, and were calling for calm and encouraging people to go home, the force added.

The local MP issued a statement saying that diversity is what gives Leicester its strength. Of course she did. It was a mostly peaceful expression of diversity, one imagines.

Have a look at this Substack analysis that tells you what really happened in Leicester. Excerpts:

All of this coyness seems very strange when anyone capable of going on Twitter and searching “Leicester Muslim” or “Leicester Hindu” will quickly find a wide range of videos which quickly make it apparent that this was a sectarian riot between those two groups.

Using those videos, the timeline becomes clearer:

Events began with a Hindu protest crowd, who were filmed walking down the road chanting sectarian slogans. In some footage they are clearly chanting “Jai Shree Ram”. Although it can be used as a greeting, in recent years it has been used by Hindu lynch mobs in India. There were claims some of the Hindus may have travelled from London to join the protest, although it’s unconfirmed.

In response to this, Muslim protestors quickly gathered and mobs formed to attack the Hindus. They managed to trap the Hindu protestors in a small area, with lines of police protecting them and keeping the mobs apart. On videos, Muslims can be heard blaming a minority of Hindu extremists, who they say hate Muslims.

As night descended and the two mobs remained kept apart by large amounts of police, more and more young men arrived to join. Groups of Muslims were said to be arriving from all over the West Midlands, whilst voices within the mob called for more reinforcements. Footage shows Muslim men chanting “Allahu Akbar” and “Takbir”, phrases often although not exclusively associated with jihadists.

Things were thrown at the police. At least one person was badly beaten. And a Muslim climbed onto a Hindu temple and threw down their flag.

Away from the main area of disorder, groups of young men patrolled the streets and smashed up cars or rolled them over. Some cars were abandoned in the middle of the street by drivers.

All of this evidence is easy to find if you have an internet connection. There is no way that a competent journalist can be unaware of who is responsible and what the rioting is about. 

After being blasted for covering up the diverse nature of the riots -- sorry, "large-scale disorder" -- the BBC issued a more accurate report. The difference is striking. The updated report is what the BBC ought to have issued in the first place, if its news editors thought their job was to accurately reflect events in the real world, as opposed to preventing RACISTS from drawing RACIST conclusions.

About twenty years ago, I got into an argument with a liberal Boomer journalist colleague about this sort of thing. He believed that the function of the news media is to "put a damper on passions" -- and that withholding information was therefore justifiable. I thought that was outrageous, across the board, until I went to an international conference of Christian journalists, and heard from a journalist in India, who explained that her bosses on occasion would deliberately suppress information about Muslim-Hindu clashes, for the sake of preventing loss of life. She made a very convincing case for the wisdom of doing this.

But that's India, not Great Britain, where Diversity Is Our Strength™. The progressives who administer our society and its institutions are going to insist that we lie to ourselves and each other until the whole thing falls apart, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings hurl thunderbolts.

When liberals sneer at Viktor Orban for not wanting to import diversity into Hungary, this ultra-vibrancy is the kind of thing he's wanting to avoid.

UPDATE: A case of the media lying by omission. You'll remember the national coverage for the false accusation a black Duke player made against BYU fans, saying that a fan chanted the n-word at her. An investigation showed there was no such thing, at all, ever. Well, this happened over the weekend, was caught on camera, but ... crickets. Because the target of the insult was Mormons, who are overwhelmingly white: