The suspect behind the Palisades fire that devastated Los Angeles had an obsession with Luigi Mangione — the left-wing folk hero who murdered a healthcare CEO in broad daylight on a Manhattan sidewalk. ABC and CBS covered the arson arrest. They just conveniently left out the part where this guy’s inspiration was a celebrated left-wing killer.

If the arsonist had a MAGA hat, it would be the only thing they mentioned. It would be in the headline. It would be in the chyron. It would be the first word out of every anchor’s mouth for six straight weeks. Anderson Cooper would be doing prime-time specials about “the pipeline from rally to arson.” But a Luigi Mangione superfan who allegedly set fire to one of America’s most expensive neighborhoods? That detail, apparently, isn’t newsworthy.

Let’s be crystal clear about what happened here: major American television networks made an active editorial decision to hide a relevant fact from their audience. This wasn’t an oversight. This wasn’t running out of time in the segment. This was a calculated choice to protect a narrative. The narrative being: left-wing violence inspiration doesn’t exist, left-wing folk heroes don’t radicalize people, and the only dangerous ideology in America comes from one direction.

Remember when Mangione shot that CEO? Remember how certain corners of the internet — and more than a few mainstream commentators — celebrated it? Remember the T-shirts? The fan art? The people calling him a hero for murdering a man in cold blood? We were told that was just “venting frustration with the healthcare system.” Nothing to worry about. Definitely not going to inspire anyone.

Well. Here we are.

A man allegedly set fires that destroyed homes, displaced families, killed people’s sense of security in their own neighborhoods — and his digital footprint reportedly shows an obsession with a man who became famous for political murder. That’s not a minor detail. That’s the detail. That’s the story within the story. And two of the three major broadcast networks decided you don’t need to know about it.

This is the same media that will spend three days analyzing the social media history of any suspect who ever liked a conservative Facebook page. They’ll trace the “radicalization pipeline” from a Jordan Peterson YouTube video to a Ben Shapiro podcast to whatever crime occurred, constructing elaborate narratives about right-wing extremism. But when the pipeline runs from celebrated left-wing violence to actual arson? Crickets. Selective amnesia. Moving right along.

For those of us who are retired, who remember when journalism meant telling people what happened — ALL of what happened — this is infuriating. We’re not asking these networks to editorialize. We’re asking them to report basic facts about a criminal suspect. Facts they clearly had access to. Facts they chose to bury because those facts make their ideological allies look bad.

Here’s what the selective editing tells you: these networks don’t think you can handle the full picture. They don’t trust you to process information and draw your own conclusions. They think if they tell you the arsonist idolized a left-wing killer, you might start asking uncomfortable questions about whether celebrating political violence has consequences. And they can’t have that conversation, because too many people in their orbit participated in the Mangione worship.

So they memory-hole it. They give you the arrest, they give you the charges, they give you the fire footage — and they surgically remove the motivation because the motivation is inconvenient. This is not reporting. This is curation. This is narrative management. And it’s exactly why millions of Americans don’t trust these people anymore.

The Palisades fire destroyed real homes. Real families lost everything. And now we know the suspect was reportedly radicalized by the same left-wing violence that mainstream media spent months downplaying and even celebrating. ABC and CBS don’t want you connecting those dots. Too bad. We just did.

If your ideology’s heroes are inspiring arsonists, maybe stop making them heroes. And if your news network is hiding that connection, maybe stop calling yourselves journalists.