Those “Youths” Are Restive Again

Riots are going on in Bagnolet, France, a Paris suburb. As usual, you have to pore over the news accounts to see who, exactly, the rioters are:

Restive youths in a Paris suburb torched a tourist bus and nearly a half-dozen cars and hurled objects at police early Tuesday, a night after fullblown unrest prompted by the death of a teen fleeing police. …
An Associated Press Television News crew saw at least five torched cars and a burned-out tourist bus near a housing project. Groups of youths set street fires, sometimes fueling them with garbage cans or a mattress in one case and hurled stones and other objects at police.
Authorities had sent teams of riot police into the Bagnolet suburb just east of Paris after a night of violence following the Sunday night death of an 18-year-old pizza deliverer fleeing police on his motorcycle. Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux had called for calm, signaling fears that unrest by angry suburban youth could worsen.

Well, we know the “youths” are “suburban”–that narrows it down a bit, I guess–and they’re “restive.” Restive means “impatient of control, restraint, or delay;” I guess you could say that. In usual parlance, though, there is a gap between “restive” and “time to call out the riot police.”
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Presumably the Associated Press assumes we all know who these “suburban” youths are, and they don’t need to belabor the point. They’re probably right. Still, there is something odd about a world in which it is commonly understood that the function of a news service is to filter, rather than simply report, the news.

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