So we now have direct evidence that Barack Obama, the President of the United States, lied to the American public about an email scandal in which his law enforcement agencies appear to have (at best) allowed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to skate.  Meanwhile, from a different source, we’re learning about the apparently illegal activity of the Clinton campaign, with paid allied activists crafting messages with the campaign and seeking to foment violence at Donald Trump rallies.

What’s the big story on the front page of today’s Providence Journal?  Rhode Island’s Congressmen haven’t been completely inactive in Washington.  As for the Campaign 2016 page, if anything, it presents clandestine sources of information about the sleazy dealings of government officials as if they, the sources, are a threat to our democracy.  Really.  This is how a piece by Bloomberg’s Chris Strohm starts:

Hacking attacks. Voter intimidation. Foreign interference. No election in modern U.S. history has faced such a convergence of threats, some 21st century and others as old as democracy.

Strohm is deliberately vague, but one can infer that he isn’t talking about the professional activists intimidating voters on Clinton’s behalf or the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play scheme for foreign governments and other entities.  Indeed, a nearby Associated Press article by Michael Biesecker frets about the legality and morality of even reading the enlightening hacked emails of Clinton cronies.

This part is just too much, though:

Despite Trump’s bombast, no bombshell revelation has emerged to significantly alter the presidential race or prompt calls for the Democratic nominee to drop out — as happened with Trump following the leak of a decade-old video of him vulgarly bragging about groping women.

That lack of a “bombshell” isn’t a function of the content.  As stated above, the emails show direct lies by the President of the United States and collusion between the campaign, the administration, and the news media.  Even tangential issues found in the emails — like Podesta’s conspiracy to divide and conquer the Roman Catholic Church in the United States — are objectively “bombshells” if one isn’t programmed to excuse everything that progressives and Democrats do.

In other words, the American news media is actively downplaying or ignoring stories that hurt its favored political party and then pointing to the lack of attention as evidence that information obtained by furtive means is not only dangerous to democracy but frivolous, too.

This is one way the system is rigged.