There were plenty of contenders for the biggest news story this week. North Carolina officials ordered a new election on Thursday in the state’s 9th congressional district after hearing testimony about widespread absentee-ballot fraud during last fall’s race. Dramatic testimony from the son of Mark Harris, the Republican candidate who officially received the most votes last November, revealed that he had warned his father last year that a local political operative’s ballot collection plan was likely illegal. The Republican Party often invokes the illusory menace of widespread voter fraud; now they’ve had an election victory overturned for election fraud themselves.

Another contender would be the arrest of Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant in Maryland, for allegedly planning to carry out a targeted killing spree against prominent journalists and Democratic lawmakers. Federal prosecutors warned a judge earlier this week that he sought “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country.” Hasson’s plan, court filings suggest, was to use the killings as part of a broader campaign to secure a “white homeland” within the United States. It’s the second time in six months that one of President Donald Trump’s supporters has been arrested while allegedly plotting to kill his political opponents.

But one story received more media coverage than either of those, or any other this week: the arrest of Empire actor Jussie Smollett for filing a false police report in Chicago. Smollett, who is black and gay, told police earlier this month that he had been attacked by two white men who shouted “This is MAGA country,” used racial and homophobic slurs, poured an unidentified liquid on him, and tied a noose around his neck. Investigators now say that Smollett paid two other men to help stage the apparent hate crime, potentially out of frustration with his salary and screen time on the popular Fox drama. Smollett denies the allegations.

Critics seized on the Smollett episode to make broad pronouncements about the American left and the journalists that covered his story. There’s a certain irony about this, as the frenzy of coverage has obscured other news stories that tell deeper truths about the current political moment. For all the ways in which conservatives claim that mainstream news outlets are biased toward liberals, the last week shows how conservative narratives still get privileged in mainstream political discourse.

Smollett’s story prompted a flurry of attention from the beginning; his arrest turned it into a blizzard of commentary. Cable news covered every twist and turn in elaborate detail. The New York Times sent multiple push alerts to apprise mobile readers of new developments. Major publications saw deeper meaning. The Atlantic’s John McWhorter opined that Smollett’s alleged fraud reflected the broader problem of racial “victimhood chic” in contemporary American culture. USA Today’s James Robbins argued that the “real issue” was “how easily and quickly people latch onto hoaxes like the one attributed to Smollett, aiding and abetting the farce absent any solid evidence to support it.”