Over the past couple of days, we've seen several police officers shot in the line of duty.  Two of those incidents, one in San Antonio (in which the officer was killed) and one in St. Louis (in which the officer survived), were clearly unprovoked "ambush"-style attacks, not precipitated by any interaction between the cop and the shooter and with no connection between the cop and his attacker.

The first thing I happened to notice about the way these two incidents have been reported is that the race or ethnicity of the officer involved was not deemed an important part of the story.  In the San Antonio murder (for it was, clearly, a murder), the victim's photo was shown, and one could easily surmise from that photo that the cop was white.  In the St. Louis attempted murder (for it was, clearly, an attempted murder), the victim's name has not been furnished in any of the accounts I have seen thus far, but it's probably not too big a leap to presume (absent any indication to the contrary) that the cop shot is also white.

In both cases, the perpetrator has been identified as "African-American."  In San Antonio, a black suspect is in custody, and in St. Louis, the perpetrator, also black, was subsequently shot and killed by police.

But the respective races of the perps and their victims have hardly been shouted from the rooftops – certainly not the way race would figure – and has figured – in any story in which the police did the shooting.  When the cops do the shooting and the person shot is anything but white, the narrative is straight out of the Ministry of Propaganda mainstream media playbook: cops are, like American society at large, inherently, intrinsically racist, and they go out each and every day looking for minorities, particularly blacks, to shoot for no reason whatsoever.  We can expect the MSM to hammer that meme ad nauseam.

But when the shoe is on the other foot, does the propagandist press advance an equivalent narrative?  Are any talking heads speculating whether there's an agenda by blacks to murder cops?

It's similar to the way Islamic terrorism is reported.  When the perpetrator of a mass killing remains unnamed in the news reports, it's a good bet that when the name is eventually revealed, it'll be "Mohammed" or something similar.  And it's also a pretty good bet that the murderous actions will not be tied to Islam, to jihad, or to anything in the Most Holy Quran™.  Rather, we'll be told that "authorities are still trying to understand what may have motivated" the perp, who "had been dealing with personal mental/emotional issues."

So don't expect anyone in the MSM to connect these cowardly ambushes (only the most recent, but hardly the only ones) to the violent rhetoric of Black Lives Matter or to those marching and chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon!"

As in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze" (sometimes known as "The Case of the Dog that Didn't Bark"), a news story can often reveal important information by what it doesn't say, and the narrative it doesn't employ.

Or perhaps the MSM-approved narrative in these recent shootings is "Cops who happen to be white are shot (for reasons which remain a mystery) by suspects who happen to be black."