Can I get a show of hands of anyone who has embellished, exaggerated or out-and-out fabricated a story to make yourself seem bigger, better, braver or somehow more important than you really were in some real, partly real or wholly imagined situation?  Now, for those with their hands up, keep them up if you are paid in the neighborhood of $1,000,000.00/month to be the voice of truth for a major TV network?  I don’t have any of that slick software that allows me to visually eavesdrop through your web cams, but I’m going to make an educated guess that all hands went down, (no way Brian Williams is reading my blog).

I don’t know Mr. Williams, but I confess to having been charmed by his smooth, salt-of-the-Earth public persona and having accepted, (as much as I accept any commercialized version of the fourth estate), that his readings of news items were fact-checked to some, however minimal and selective, journalistic standard.  Oh, and he’s got that cool, never-gonna-grow-up, potty-mouthed daughter that gives him a groovy paternal street cred.  But, what the fuck, Brian?  Your problem, whatever name the network spin will eventually call it, aside from being most likely career-ending, will no doubt drive countless NBC News viewers in search of ‘truthier’ alternatives, like the repetitively confusing blather of CNN, the fairytale fabrications of FOX News, the ungodly liberalism of Bill Maher’s Real Time, (I like Bill Maher but I’m showing how unbiased I can be), or, (sorry, Mr. Cronkite), to the WWW which could lead these lost news refugees into the dark abyss of bat-shit-crazy-time like The Drudge Report or Joel’s Blog.  Is it any wonder that we can’t agree on anything when veracity is just another word for nothing left to lose?