Here’s the information from a top-of-the-front-page Associated Press article that ran in today’s Providence Journal:

“I saw that suddenly people were fleeing and shouting,” she said, speaking by phone from Nice. “People were shouting, ‘It’s a terrorist attack! It’s a terrorist attack!’ It was clear that the driver was doing it deliberately.”

The astonishing thing is that it takes reporters Ciaran Fahey and Raphael Satter until paragraph 20 for the statement that the massacre in Nice, France, was likely a terrorist attack (which we now know to be true).  Here are the operative phrases in the opening paragraphs, which (to my mind) bring into question the integrity of the journalists and the publication that selected this particular article for its coverage:

• Paragraph 1: “A truck loaded with weapons and hand grenades drove onto a sidewalk”
• Paragraph 2: “the truck ran over people on a ‘long trip’ down the sidewalk”
• Paragraph 3: “a Nice native who spoke to the AP nearby, said that he saw a truck drive into the crowd”
• Paragraph 5: “the truck plowed into the crowd over a distance of 1.2 miles”
• In paragraph 7, we finally learn that the truck had “a driver.”

We’re reaching the point, in Western Civilization, that we face the very real possibility of death by passive voice and personification.  For crying out loud: Even those whose reading is no deeper than Harry Potter should have learned the lesson that one can’t defeat an evil whom one won’t even name.

Perhaps it would help to offer a practical lesson with reference to evils that the news media is happy to proclaim: If you want to help stop such things as the mosque vandalism in South Kingstown (assuming it wasn’t a hoax), or Donald Trump’s candidacy, or Brexit, the very first step — the very first step — is to show that you can be trusted to report on (journalists) and combat (politicians) a clear and present danger.

If your focus is, instead, your own politically correct virtue signaling, you’re only going to contribute to frustration and maybe (just maybe) finally get the backlash you’ve been self-righteously worrying about since a handful of Islamic extremists connected to an international jihadist organization flew planes into American buildings in 2001.