Biased news reporting and snarky editorials can be truly annoying. But what about news and commentary on important matters that is missing altogether? Isn’t that the kind of media bias that can really get us into trouble?

Several recent examples:

1.) Last Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Representative James Comer (R-KY), issued a 38-page report revealing what appears to be a sophisticated, high-dollar foreign influence-peddling scheme involving Joe Biden’s family. IF TRUE (always the essential caveat), it could take down the Biden presidency and doom any chance for reelection in 2024.

In its report, Comer’s committee claims to have unearthed reliable evidence showing that, during and after Joe Biden’s service as vice president, nine members of his family received payments from various foreign entities totaling more than $10 million. The payments were distributed via a network of 20 shell corporations, an operation that has the look of a complex money-laundering scheme with no underlying legitimate business explanation.

That’s an absolute stunner. While it is an emerging story with much more to be learned, the revelations by a congressional committee about a potentially massive conflict of interest on the part of a sitting U.S. president is surely newsworthy.

Evidently not. Last week’s news reporting by mainstream broadcasters and progressive media was saturated with the usual trivia, but the Comer bombshell was ignored — almost completely. Radio silence. Crickets.

2.) The same day, from a report from the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), we learned that the widely heralded 2020 letter signed by 51 former senior U.S. intelligence officers was (1) incorrect, (2) solicited by the Biden campaign, and (3) prepared with CIA help.

That letter provided seemingly informed assurance from supposedly credible sources that the Hunter Biden laptop was, in all likelihood, a Russian disinformation plant. Its release led directly to the widespread blackout of media coverage on the laptop and its contents, a voter information gap that certainly affected the 2020 election. And last week’s news that the letter was an inside job has been largely ignored by mainstream media.

3.) And then this week, another seismic jolt: the release, finally (after four years), of a full report by John Durham, the special counsel assigned by Trump Attorney General William Barr to determine the origins of the Russia collusion investigations.

Allegations of improper collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interests captivated America during the 2016 presidential election and the first two and a half years of the Trump presidency. Durham’s 300-page report evidently confirms what many on the Right have maintained for all these years: The entire FBI investigation was a baseless exercise, conducted principally with the objective of preventing, and later upending, the Trump presidency. Dare we call it a “witch hunt”?

The reaction so far in mainstream news is, once again, either deafening silence or smug dismissal. And true enough, Durham’s report arrives long after the fact — loaded with satisfying we-told-you-so information and lessons learned but with little bearing on events of today.

But is it not newsworthy? Consider for a moment the massive impact of the Russia collusion hoax: four years of intensive but unfounded and poorly conducted actions by America’s front-line investigators; consuming disruption of the Trump administration (which could have been catastrophic for the nation had there been a simultaneous crisis); the embarrassing collective failure of American journalism to see through an obvious hatchet job, instead awarding itself Pulitzer Prizes for excellence in reporting.

All in all, it was a thoroughly disgraceful chapter in American history, now consciously ignored by those who had a hand in it.

Two compelling conclusions leap from the empty newspaper pages:

First, the watchdog press that we rely upon to keep our government honest is asleep at the switch. Much of today’s print and broadcast news reporting is like a fan club periodical, more interested in pushing politicized narratives than providing objective oversight of anything. It does not bridge our nation’s divisions; it amplifies them.

Secondly (and again with the caveat, if true), we find that in two successive U.S. presidential elections, 2016 and 2020, government entities overtly interfered and quite possibly affected the election outcomes. That is intolerable and must be corrected.

And while we’re thinking about it, what does that say about the supposedly unpatriotic, anti-democratic sin of questioning the validity of a “fair and transparent” election? That famous BIG LIE is beginning to feel pretty puny.