Here’s how the L.A. Times portrays a portion of yesterday’s testimony from the Zimmerman trial:

Jeantel is important in the case because she was the last person to talk with Martin and can discuss what he was saying in the crucial last moments of his life. On the night of Feb. 26, she was in Miami, talking on her cellphone with Martin, who was in Sanford visiting family. He told her he was going to the store to get some candy and a drink. Then, she said, he became concerned. “A man was watching him,” Jeantel said Martin told her, several times. “He said a man kept watching him. “I asked him how the man looked like,” she said. Martin replied that he “looked like a creepy … cracker,” she said, using a slang term for a white person. Jeantel said she warned Martin the man might be a rapist, which he laughed off. They continued chatting, but Martin then said that the man was still trailing him and that he was going to try to lose him. At that point, Jeantel said, she told Martin to run.

When I read this, I was interested in what got omitted from “creepy … cracker.” I watched a few minutes of the witness’s testimony on YouTube, embedded at Legal Insurrection, and the actual phrase was “creepy-ass cracker.”

They would say, of course, that they had to edit the phrase for language. Except that the L.A. Times uses the word “ass” all the time. I mean: all the time. I’ll just give you three examples from this month alone:

From a story about James Gandolfini:

When Gandolfini read the script, he told Vanity Fair in 2007, “I laughed my ass off. I was like, This is really different and good, and odd.”

From a whimsical piece about “zombie Olympics”:

While most zombies would be no match for a man who “kicks ass for the Lord,” these zombies manage to use their ability to successfully fall apart to maximum effect, crunching him on the neck with a head that had been kicked off into the sky.

And from an article about Wolfgang Puck and other chefs:

“That’s a new cook,” Choi said pointing to Favreau. “We’re kicking his ass.”

So the “we have to edit stories for language” excuse doesn’t fly. And guess what? There’s another thing Trayvon Martin said to his friend that got omitted from the story. Speaking of Zimmerman, Martin told his friend: “now the nigger’s following me.”

That is portrayed as “Martin then said that the man was still trailing him.”

They have always hidden stuff from you. With the Internet, these days you can figure out what they’re hiding.