The short answer is that they don’t.

Anyone doubting that should review the coverage of a heinous assault on personal property last month in a District of Columbia residential area.

The target of the crime was a 2007 Hummer H2 SUT (Sport Utility Truck), which has a base price of $54,155. It is a niche-market truck, which means it is aimed at a relatively small buyer population — usually young, single men who have a penchant for things such as extreme sports and off-road driving.

The H2 is a four-wheel-drive vehicle available as a four-door SUV — its more popular format — or as a four-door pickup, such as the one that was viciously destroyed on what my paper, The Washington Post, called a “narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington where (Toyota) Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm.” The H2 SUT, with its 6.0-liter, 325-horsepower V-8, is the workhorse of the bunch.

General Motors, maker of all things Hummer, sold 17,107 H2 models in the United States last year, down from 23,213 in 2005, a precipitous 26.3 percent drop — a clear indication that the market is doing what it so efficiently does, which is to weed out products that are becoming too expensive because of externalities such as rising fuel prices.

But zealots on narrow, leafy streets have no patience for the workings of the market. They have no respect for freedom of consumer choice. They have no respect for personal-property rights — or for anything or anyone that gets in the way of their self-righteous ideology.

That is bad enough. That is dangerous enough. But what is worse is the tendency of the media to tacitly condone such attitudes and behavior, to chortle over it, make light of it when a violent expression of media-held biases — to wit: We don’t like SUVs — occurs.

That is what happened in the local coverage of the attack on Gareth Groves’ Hummer H2 SUT. (I repeat the model designation because of the general media’s disgusting habit, which is another indication of media bias, of incorrectly describing all Hummer vehicles as being one and the same, as was done in many of the stories about the destruction of the Hummer on Brandywine Street.) Consider The Post’s headline on the story: “Hummer Owner Gets Angry Message: Vandals Batter D.C. Man’s SUV, Slash Its Tires and Scratch In an Eco Note.”

Think about that. A crime against property was committed. It was a hate crime. But because it was a hate crime against a hated SUV, there’s a headline that equates the crime to nothing more than delivering an angry message.

What if that Hummer H2 SUT had been a church, synagogue or mosque? Headline: “Congregation Gets Angry Message: Vandals Break Windows, Slash Pews and Carve In an Anti-Religious Note.” That would have been sufficient? That would have been fair?

The local TV-news readers were no better in their treatment of the story. “Was it vandalism or eco-terrorism?” one of the news readers asked.

Excuse me. Is there a difference? What would the question have been had TV been around in the days when it was common fare to lynch people because of objections to the color of their skin? “Was it murder or a lynching? News at 11!”

There was little sympathy shown for victim Groves in any of the stories. Who cares about him? He was the man who bought “the gas-guzzler,” to use the Channel 9 term, presumably bringing the attack upon himself.

The Post called Groves’ Hummer H2 SUT a “seven-foot-tall behemoth” that was “too massive to fit in his garage.” Actually, the truck is 6 feet 6 inches tall with a ground-to-axle clearance of 9.9 inches — so designed because the H2 SUT primarily is an off-road vehicle. But that’s a minor quibble in the world of anti-SUV media bias. What matters here is that two brave bat-and-knife wielding souls, wearing masks to conceal their identity, had the gumption to teach Groves a lesson, to send him an “angry message” that his big truck was not wanted on that narrow, leafy street in Washington where Prius cars and Volvos are the norm.

As a black child of the once-segregated South, I am familiar with receiving such angry messages. A black family would move into a formerly all-white neighborhood with narrow, leafy streets, and a few of the residents of those streets would take it upon themselves to send that black family an angry message — maybe by putting a few bricks through windows, spray-painting the house with hateful invective or burning it down. Was that vandalism or racial terrorism?

Hardly any of us would stand for that behavior today. But many of us, according to comments in The Post’s story and in much of the other local media, at least find it amusing, maybe satisfying that two enviro-thugs would destroy the object of their hatred, a Hummer.

“Now, as Groves ponders what to do with the remains of his SUV, he has been the target of a number of people who have driven by the crime scene in his upscale neighborhood and glared at him in smug satisfaction,” The Post’s story said.

Yeah, well ...

What if the scene had been a row of arson-torched houses in that neighborhood, or a bunch of crushed and short-circuited Toyota Prius gas-electric cars? Would those neighbors have looked in smug satisfaction on that? Would the media have been so sanguine?

What occurred on Brandywine Street was a vicious crime. It was a violent attack on property rights, an attack on freedom, no different from any other terrorist attack on freedom. It represents a threat to all of us, Hummer lovers and haters. If and when the culprits are apprehended, they should be treated accordingly in the courts.