Toward the end of The Sound of Music, the von Trapp family singers are called on stage to accept first prize in the Salzburg Music Festival.

Ta-da!, the orchestra plays triumphantly. Nothing. Just a lonely spotlight illuminating nothing. Ta-da! the orchestra repeats expectantly. Still nothing. We soon learn the family has fled the festival to escape the drape of Naziism encircling Austria.

In an eerily similar disappearing act, journalism has abandoned the American stage, leaving a bright, bare spotlight where an examination of our most pressing scandals and scourges ought to be.

Journalism has left us just when the republic needed it most. And it’s the most catastrophic institutional failure since the Civil War. Even the financial collapse of the Great Depression was survivable for the nation. This crash might not be.

Just a few of the ta-da! moments journalism has failed to turn a lasting spotlight on:

• Hillary Clinton’s magic escape act from criminal charges for stuffing a personal server with classified material and secret government business
• Her and the intelligence community’s scandalous spying on her presidential rival
• The Russia hoax/Mueller sham investigation, a knowing, purposeful attempt to frame Donald Trump for something, anything
• The Hunter Biden laptop coverup, aided by 51 intelligence officials
• Unexplained 2020 election irregularities
• The intelligence community’s possible role in the Jan. 6 “insurrection,” and the bizarre failure to prevent it
• The sudden, suspicious branding of Donald Trump into Public Enemy No. 1, indicting him all over the country for all sorts of purported crimes
• The adamantly intentional orchestration (“the planning or coordination of the elements of a situation to produce a desired effect, especially surreptitiously) of an invasion over our borders

On the historic border onslaught alone, it’s taken a private-citizen biologist, Bret Weinstein, to investigate what’s happening at its fountainhead: the inaccessible, man-eating  Darién Gap, where even the Pan-American Highway dare not venture. In an extensive interview with Tucker Carlson, Weinstein detailed what he went on to witness during a visit there — something almost no American journalist has bothered to do.

In one migrant staging camp, Weinstein mingled freely with friendly, open sojourners excited to tell him about their dangerous trek to the United States – and in another encampment, which he was not allowed to enter, he encountered a strikingly homogenous cadre of young, male Chinese who, he said, were loath to talk about their reasons for migrating and even hostile toward inquisitors.

“They are the opposite of forthcoming. They have no interest in talking to outsiders,” Weinstein told Carlson. “I’ve been to dangerous places before. I’ve been to places where people fear their government and can’t talk to you because they feel it’s not safe. This didn’t feel like that at all. This felt like people who did not want to share information because it would be a mistake to do so.”

At one point outside that cloistered camp, Weinstein says an associate of his tricked a supposedly Korean migrant into speaking Chinese.

“It is not a friendly migration,” Weinstein said ominously.

Where are the American media? Why do they exhibit no curiosity whatsoever about the dark motivations that may be behind many of the millions coming here in an unprecedented surge the past three years?

And now, in another bombshell report that had to spring from outside the traditional news media, there are “multiple credible sources” saying former President Barack Obama’s CIA asked its counterparts in allied nations to spy on as many as 26 Trump functionaries in advance of the 2016 election – which may have been a pretext for blatant spying on Trump and Co. by our own intelligence community.

If true, it’s one of the biggest scandals in all of American history. Yet to this point, the story has been met with a drowsy, cavernous yawn from the media – the result being that those Americans who confine themselves to consuming certain left-wing media outlets may never hear of the allegations or examine the credibility of them.

That fathomless, unfathomable disinterest by the media makes it all the more urgent for anyone responsible for the alleged illegal and un-American spying enterprise to come forward and share what they know and what they may have done.

The question is, would the media even listen?

Certainly the media can be assiduously attentive and pointed in their coverage when it fits their predetermined narrative. For instance, when the Senate bill essentially legalizing illegal immigration was rejected out of hand, NBC News’ headline was “Senate Republicans knife bipartisan border security bill, declaring it dead.”

They “knifed” a legislative proposal, as if the reporter or editor was personally wounded by it. And as if Republicans had committed a murder.

If only the media cared that much about actual crime and covered it that pointedly.

In another case in which the media’s blind spots are showing, The Hill reported, when the House’s first impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas failed, “The 214-216 vote is a stunning loss for a GOP that has faced continual pressure from its right flank to impeach a Biden official, even as the party has waffled over which one to focus on.”

As if lawmakers were merely thrashing about for someone’s pelt they could hoist. As if there were no legal, humanitarian or national security crisis at the border.

Indeed, the number and size of American journalism’s blind spots is plainly staggering, and cannot be ascribed to either ignorance or negligence. It’s inarguably the purposeful looking away from certain stories and scandals in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of one political faction over the other.

That’s not the job of a journalist; it’s the purview of the propagandist. And it seems aimed toward tugging the nation toward one-party rule. It is mere history, not hyperbole, to note that one-party states are nearly always associated with communism, fascism and authoritarianism.

Another feature of such states is the imprisoning of one’s political enemies.

But, Ta-dah! Nothing to see here. The media have a wholly selective disinterest in it all.

They are but a spotlight illuminating nothing.