The next time you see a headline talking about “another night of violent protests,” consider that what the headline has done is to prime you to think, in the absence of any evidence or argument, that the protesters were responsible for whatever violence took place, even if law enforcement was responsible for all of it. What the phrase “violent protest” seems to imply is that it’s the protesters that were violent, not merely that violence took place at a protest.

If the rest of the article fails to resolve the question on the merits, the headline breaks the tie in abstraction from the merits. That’s how myths are created, and how falsehood is generated from what sounds like careful agnosticism. Why not speak of “another night of violent law enforcement actions”? Because the person writing the headline can’t afford to let you frame things that way. If you did, you might conclude that law enforcement is, through and through, the heart of the problem. And that’s not the conclusion you’re supposed to reach.