When folks think of media bias, they tend to think immediately of the leftward slant of the news.

But that isn’t the half of it. More often than not, the most damaging bias occurs not in how a story is covered by the mainstream media but in whether the story is covered at all.

Such is precisely the case with one of the biggest and most consequential news stories in a generation: the story of the Left’s assault on free speech — and, more specifically, the collusion by Democrats and Big Tech to systematically suppress the speech they deem to be a threat to their prevailing narrative or their hold on power.

The New York Times and The Washington Post, two of our nation’s most influential newspapers, have set the tone here by all but ignoring the story of Elon Musk’s opening of the Twitter Files, which have so far revealed not only a stunning degree of corrupt coordination between Twitter and our nation’s investigative and intelligence services but also a remarkable willingness to silence conservative speech by way of shadow banning and other heretofore mysterious methods.

All the news that’s fit to print, eh? Democracy dies in darkness, eh?

New York Post columnist Miranda Devine puts her finger on an unwieldy German word that perfectly describes what the Times and the Post are attempting to do here: totschweigetaktik — literally translated as death-silence-tactic.

Indeed, they’re trying to kill the story by ignoring it.

Leave it to our Teutonic friends, the same folks who gave us schadenfreude, to dream up such a term. And leave it to the Left’s most powerful media organs to employ it. As Devine writes:

Apart from defending Twitter’s 2020 decision to censor The Post, The Times has not covered the revelations of the last 10 days, save a couple of stories smearing Twitter’s freedom-minded new owner Elon Musk. He “sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump,” The Times opined, delivering the worst possible insult in the eyes of its 6.3 million subscribers. …

Over at The Washington Post, resident disinformation expert Taylor Lorenz went on TV falsely to claim that Elon Musk had laid off the staff who monitored child sexual exploitation material. The opposite is the case. On taking over Twitter, Musk declared his “priority #1” was to remove such material and, in two weeks, did more to cleanse Twitter of child abuse content than previous management had done in a decade.

Devine certainly deserves a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on this scandal, which began before the 2020 election — before it even was a scandal. Clearly, though, the Pulitzer Prize doesn’t deserve Miranda Devine.

What about elsewhere in Big Media? Crickets and tumbleweeds, according to Fox News. “The major Sunday shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN devoted a total of seven seconds to the story.”

Seven seconds across four networks to a story that, among other things, changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has also noticed the mainstream media’s unwillingness to engage in journalism it deems uncomfortable — especially when it’s so much easier to simply censor the opposition. He writes:

You don’t need a state ministry of information if the media voluntarily maintains official narratives and suppresses dissenting views. And what emerges from these files is the notion of an effective state media in America — an alliance of media, business and political figures who act not out of government compulsion but out of personal conviction.

The notion of a privately-run state media is reinforced by the response to these disturbing disclosures — a virtual news blackout, with most major media offering little coverage of the disclosures. Just as Twitter suppressed dissenting or opposing views in a myriad of ways, many in the media are minimizing coverage of this scandal.

Former House Rep. Trey Gowdy offered his view on the lack of Leftmedia coverage: “A group of Democrats showing preference for a Democrat and suppressing Republicans, it’s just not breaking news. … I mean, The New York Times has been doing it for decades. So, I mean, shame on us for becoming so reliant on social media. If there is entanglement between government or law enforcement or intelligence community and Twitter, that’s a different story. But The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican since Dwight Eisenhower.”

The Leftmedia’s goal is plain to see: ignore the story until it goes away. And if that fails, begin calling it “old news.”

Those of us who appreciate the importance of free speech and fair elections can’t allow it to happen.