Hillary Clinton wasted little time in assigning responsibility for Thursday’s shooting in Dallas that left five police officers dead — blame whitey!

“I’m going to be talking to white people, we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens,” Mrs. Clinton told CNN Friday. “Clearly, there seems to be a terrible disconnect between many police departments and officers and the people they have sworn to protect.”

Exactly what “legitimate grievances” motivated cop-hating gunman Micah Xavier Johnson were not specified by the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Nor did Mrs. Clinton explain why reports of wrongful police actions in Louisiana and Minnesota should have led to bloodshed in Dallas, where the police chief is a black man and law enforcement officials have striven to build trust in the community. Yet the former Secretary of State’s misplaced concerns were not disputed by the interviewer Wolf Blitzer, whose network’s bias is so blatant that Democrats who supported Bernie Sanders in this year’s primary campaign revived the longstanding Republican claim that CNN is an acronym for “Clinton News Network.”

Being pro-Clinton requires CNN and other establishment media outlets to conform their coverage to fit whatever narrative serves the “permanent campaign” mode that Democrats have maintained since Bill Clinton was inaugurated more than 20 years ago, after he received a mere 43 percent of the vote in the three-way election of 1992. Liberal journalists have never ceased singing along with the Fleetwood Mac tune that was the Clinton campaign theme song, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” expressing their shared hope that the future would bring eternal Democratic control of the federal government. Unfortunately for the media elite, the electorate has at times disrupted their Democrat dreams, as in 1994, when the GOP captured a majority in Congress for the first time in 40 years, and ABC News anchor Peter Jennings accused voters of a “temper tantrum,” blaming Americans for “stomping feet” like angry 2-year-olds. Since then, the pro-Democrat biases of the so-called “mainstream” media have only become more transparent, with former Clinton campaign operative George Stephanopoulos now an allegedly objective journalist at ABC News, and CNN’s morning broadcast being anchored by Chris Cuomo, a scion of the New York Democrat dynasty.

A major goal of the Democrat propaganda operation is to reinforce the message that Republicans are the party of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Performing their partisan duty requires “Democrats with bylines,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds has dubbed these media hacks, to incite a climate of fear and hatred. Credulous readers of the New York Times and viewers of CNN are encouraged to think of America as a place populated by hateful bigots who victimize women, terrorize homosexuals, and oppress ethnic minorities. Promoting this paranoid portrait of the nation is necessary to the media’s partisan goal of convincing voters that terrible things are routinely happening and will become even more routine if Republicans win the next election. Whatever topic dominates the media’s coverage, the basic message of all liberal journalism can always be summarized in two simple words: “Vote Democrat!”

Facts never get in the way such narratives, but the facts surrounding last week’s massacre were very difficult to ignore. Dallas gunman Micah Johnson was a supporter of anti-police hate groups, including the African American Defense League (AADL), which emerged from the original 2014 “Black Lives Matters” protests in Ferguson, Missouri. On the day Johnson’s deadly shooting rampage, an online message from the AADL’s leader, Mauricelm-Lei Millere, declared: “We have no alternative! We must kill white police officers across the country! . . . We must hide in the darkness of the night and kill the white policeman across the country!” No one could doubt the gunman’s racial motive. “The suspect said he was upset with white people and wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown said in a Friday press conference, describing what Johnson told police during the attempted negotiations before Johnson was killed.

The Dallas attack was not the only ambush of police officers last week. There were two such attacks Friday in Georgia and Missouri, while in Tennessee, one woman was killed and three other people including a police officer were injured when a black suspect went on a shooting rampage Thursday that investigators said appeared to be racially motivated. A climate of anti-police hatred has been ginned up by “Black Lives Matter” activists with the dishonest assistance of Democrats and the media. The 2014 riots in Ferguson followed the police shooting of robbery suspect Michael Brown, where the media helped promote “the lie that Brown had died in a racially motivated police execution,” as Heather Mac Donald writes in her recent book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. “The newly formed Black Lives Matter movement promoted the notion that black Americans were being hunted down and killed with impunity by renegade white police officers.”

Incidents that are known in law-enforcement jargon as “officer-involved shootings” are a statistically rare event. Although 990 people were shot by police in 2015, it must be kept in mind that (a) the vast majority of those shootings occurred during gun battles with armed suspects, and (b) in a nation of 320 million people, 990 is actually a small number. However, the media has spent the past two years focusing national attention on a series of relatively rare events in which police were accused of wrongly shooting unarmed black people. However atrocious any of those incidents were, they certainly are not common or typical. “According to one analysis, of all the people shot and killed in the U.S. by police so far in 2016, only 24 percent, or 122, were black,” investigative journalist Matthew Vadum explained Friday. “Black people are only about 13 percent of the population but they commit around half of all violent crimes. So far this year 47 percent of people shot and killed by police, or 235 individuals, were white. Only 3 percent, or 13 people shot and killed by police year to date were black and unarmed.”

While the media dwell obsessively on a comparative handful of cases that might conceivably fit the narrative promoted by “Black Lives Matter” — i.e., innocent black people killed by racist cops — many thousands of black people are victimized annually by black criminals. In Chicago alone this year, more than 250 black people have been shot to death, in a city where homicide rates have spiked in the past two years and blacks are more than 75 percent of victims. It’s not the police or white racists who are killing black people in Chicago, but because the city has a Democrat mayor (and strict gun-control laws), these fatalities are seldom mentioned by national networks that seem only to be interested in reporting crimes that fit certain political narratives.

The media’s willingness to foment racial paranoia and incite hostility toward police doesn’t help black Americans, and it arguably led directly to the bloodshed last week in Dallas. Yet if dishonest journalism helps elect Hillary Clinton to the White House, the “Democrats with bylines” don’t care who gets hurt by their lies.