In his story on Brian Williams at 10:55 p.m. ET Tuesday, Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine reported that the now-suspended anchor and his agent "were presented with a dossier of Williams' apparent lies," and that "Williams himself was only slowly grasping the depths of the mess he'd created."

That begs the obvious question of whether the public will ever get to know what's in that "dossier," and what impact its contents may have had on the substance of NBC's news reports during the past dozen (if not more) years. Excerpts from Sherman's report follow the jump (links are in original; bolds are mine):

In a softball interview with Joe Biden on Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer fretted over there being "more tension than normal" during Tuesday's State of the Union address with Republicans in control of Congress and slammed GOP reaction to a line in the speech: "...the President was talking about having arguments that are worthy of the body and the country, and then he said, 'I've run my last campaign,' and there was a smattering of applause, maybe even laughter from some Republicans and the President shot back. Did you see that as a moment of disrespect? Was it a symptom of the very pettiness that the President was referring to?"

Thus far, the nation's de facto news gatekeepers at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, have utterly failed to address the growing worldwide controversy over the absence of U.S. representation above the ambassador level at Sunday's solidarity march in Paris in the wake of Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo massacre. Crowd estimates for the Paris march range from "hundreds of thousands" to over 1.5 million.

The New York Daily News is calling the absence of a top U.S. leader "a glaring exception," and devoting its entire front page to telling our government that "You Let the World Down." The UK Daily Mail is treating the situation as a snub, also observing that Attorney General Eric Holder "was in Paris for a terrorism summit held on the march's sidelines, but he slipped away and made appearances on four American morning television talk shows just as the incredible rally was starting." But Angela Charlton and Thomas Adamson at the AP, in report carrying a 7:07 p.m. ET time stamp (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes), apparently found nothing unusual in the U.S. non-presence:

CNN's Jim Clancy has been with the network for 32 years. His network's bio says that he "brings the experience of more than three decades covering the world to every newscast on CNN International." He also apparently has a lot of pent-up feelings about the Middle East.

Those feelings boiled to the top over Twitter early Thursday. Clancy started it all by claiming that the cartoons published by journalists who were killed in the Charlie Hebdo massacre on Wednesday "NEVER mocked the Prophet. They mocked how the COWARDS tried to distort his word. Pay attention." It went downhill from there, both factually and professionally.

At 4:45 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, the New York Times, teasing an item entitled "‘Dangerous Moment’ for Europe, as Fear and Resentment Grow," tweeted that "The Paris terror attack seems certain to accelerate the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe."

Consistent with a long-established nasty habit, the opening sentence of the report by Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold has since been revised without notice, and is tagged as appearing on Thursday's front page. The headline is the same, but the first sentence now reads: "The sophisticated, military-style strike Wednesday on a French newspaper known for satirizing Islam staggered a continent already seething with anti-immigrant sentiments in some quarters, feeding far-right nationalist parties like France’s National Front." Yeah, those are Europe's biggest problems, not Islamic terrorism.