So...Brian Williams gets caught in a blatant lie regarding his reporting of combat operations in Iraq and there's handwringing and gnashing of teeth going on in the media. OMG!... NBC's credibility is even being called into question. Eric Wemple of the Washington Post asks some reasonable questions here, specifically:

"Why did it take pushback from “some brave men and women in the air crews,” however? Do these folks have to fight our wars and fact-check NBC News?

A production crew accompanied Williams on the helicopter outing. The Erik Wemple Blog has asked NBC News who and how many people were on that crew. But where have they been as Williams has gone about misremembering the episode in media appearances in recent years? Upon the 10th anniversary of the incident, the anchor visited David Letterman and couldn’t have been more unequivocal about having ridden in the ‘copter under attack: “Two of the four helicopters were hit, by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47,” Williams told the “Late Show” host.

Also in March 2013, Williams told Alec Baldwin in an interview on WNYC’s “Here’s The Thing.” Speaking of his tendency to say “I’ve got this” in sticky situations, he said, “And I’ve done some ridiculously stupid things under that banner, like being in a helicopter I had no business being in in Iraq with rounds coming into the airframe,” Williams said.

Again: Where were Williams’s crew members, who surely knew that Williams had either “conflated” his Chinook with another Chinook — his explanation — or was using the passage of time to embellish his own exploits — another explanation. And what of other NBC News employees who worked on the story? Why did they remain silent on these matters? Are they still with NBC News?

We put these questions to NBC News and haven’t heard back."

Of course, Brian Williams reporting on the whopper Hillary Clinton told about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia didn't seem to take into account that she may have "misremembered" or "conflated" which aircraft she happened to be on. But...politicians lips move; they lie. This is taken for granted. Then, here I am watching the former Propagandist-in-Chief for Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, reporting on the story, apparently oblivious to the irony of questioning Williams' credibility as the self admitted "true believer" attempts to play the part of a credible news anchor.

As for Stephanopoulos' relationship with Clinton, he writes that he had become a "true believer" during the 1992 campaign and, in retrospect, "an enabler" who wanted Clinton to see him "as his defender, not his interrogator."

"A dynamic had already started," he writes of the fallout from the Gennifer Flowers episode, "that would repeat itself many times in the years ahead -- one explained well by Reinhold Niebuhr. 'Frantic orthodoxy,' he wrote, 'is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.' I now had doubts about Clinton, had seen his flaws up close, which caused me to focus even more intently on his strengths and believe even more fervently in his ideas."

How can Stephanopoulos reconcile his willingness at the time to spin the Gennifer Flowers story with his current anger over the Monica Lewinsky affair? "I didn't think I was a hypocrite," he writes, "because my defense of Clinton against past bimbo eruptions had been predicated on my belief that he wouldn't create new ones, but maybe I was complicit because when I worked for Clinton I had been willing to suspend my disbelief about some of his more suspect denials."

Such tortured explanations -- part rationalization, part mea culpa, part masterful spin, part earnest self-doubt -- are in many ways characteristic of this book, which one minute has Stephanopoulos reveling in tactical stratagems and the next moment worrying that he has become as shameless as his nemesis Dick Morris; one minute trying to convince himself that his boss' policies matter more than anything else and the next minute fuming at Clinton's recklessness and talent for evasion.

Well, here's the thing. We could just shake our heads and dismiss Williams and Stephanopoulos as craven careerists (which they undoubtedly are), but here in America we rely on a free press to report to us the shenanigans which our government is involving us in, as well as uncovering simple corruption of government officials so that I can have the unmitigated joy of watching the spectacle of criminals doing the "perp walk" (some of the truly happy moments in my life are when I consider "public servants" behind bars). But who can forget Dan Rather blatantly producing a forgery in an attempt to influence the 2004 election?

The morning before the broadcast was scheduled to air, CBS showed the memos to the White House for a response. Dan Bartlett was the network’s contact. Before Bartlett was interviewed, he emailed copies of the memos to Albert Lloyd, Bush’s longtime National Guard expert. In an interview in 2008, Lloyd told me he immediately recognized them as forgeries: “I looked at them and I said, ‘Don’t do a damned thing with these, because these are fake.’ ”

So here is the answer to Mr. Wemple of the Washington Post: The crew didn't think to correct Williams' lie because that is what the media does; it lies. The media is guilty of dereliction of duty when it comes to providing us with the information we need to be informed and active citizens. When the president tells us he is going to war against the Islamic State, the media does not inform us that is was our own government and our so-called Middle Eastern allies who armed the Islamic State. When the nominee for Secretary of Defense tells us he is in favor of arming the illegitimate government of Ukraine in their fight against the "rebels" in the breakaway eastern provinces, our media fails to inform us that it was our own State Department that sponsored the coup and installed who we now recognize as the President of Ukraine. The media is simply the propaganda arm of the oligarchy which selects "our" candidates, making our elections as fake as our "news". It takes tremendous effort to dig out what might be the truth about what is going on in the world, and doing so will get one labeled a conspiracy theorist, another favorite tactic of "our" government to discredit those they wish to silence. Any journalist daring to oppose the occupiers of our seats of power or shine the light of truth on their workings do so at their own risk. Consider the recent PEW poll of investigative journalists as reported in The Hill:

Fears of government spying are higher among those who report on the federal government or national security and foreign affairs, with 71 percent of those journalists saying the government has collected their data. Sixty-two percent of other investigative journalists agreed.

About half of the investigative reporters surveyed said they've changed how they store their documents due to such concerns.

Fears that the U.S. government has spied on journalists have been highlighted in recent years, as the Obama administration has moved to stop leaks of national security information.

Last week, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson testified before a Senate panel that she believed Obama officials treat investigative journalists and their sources like "enemies of the state."

"The job of getting at the truth has never been more difficult," she said during the confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch.

Or, the fact that political minders restrict access to government officials, going so far as requiring escorts to go to the bathroom:

“It was a police state. It was absurd how heavy handed the capitol police and Democratic staff were in trying to control everywhere the press went,” New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters said in an interview.

or locking them in a closet:

Powers was the designated pool reporter, there to record the proceedings for the press corps in general. He told ABC News that he showed up at 11:15 a.m. Wednesday to cover Vice President Biden and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., attending a $500-a-head fundraiser at the Winter Park manse of developer Alan Ginsburg. A young female staffer met him at the door and brought him to the storage closet. "You're going to have to wait in here until the VP gets here," he says she told him. "You're kidding me," he recalls responding.

I swore an oath long ago to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We have no freedom when we are propagandized by the media and the criminals occupying Washington D.C. purporting to be a legitimate government. We have a duty to our fellow Americans and to posterity to return to the principles which once made us "exceptional". Now we are well down the road to being just another dictatorship in the annals of history. If we don't perform our duty, our grandchildren will be right in cursing us for allowing freedom to slip from our grasp.