KELLY RIDDELL: Why the rape that escaped the media and national attention must not be ignored.

Rape stories, when they can be used to vault social-justice issues into the nation’s psyche, get exhaustive coverage and opining by the mainstream media, regardless of whether they’re even true.

But if a 14-year-old girl gets gang-raped while attending high-school by two illegal immigrants?

Crickets. That’s a narrative that doesn’t need to be advanced. Lord forbid, it may even help persuade some that President Donald Trump’s positions on illegal immigration may be correct.

The bias is almost too much to bear.

The news media’s ultimate power is the ability to suffocate stories they disagree with, and fan the flames of narratives they want to advance. And in many cases, those narratives are false.

Whoopi Goldberg said it best — there’s rape and then there’s rape-rape. What she left out is that it’s only rape-rape when it advances the narrative, and that’s regardless of whether it happened.