When “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams crashed and burned over all the tall tales he had told, there must have been mirth in the hallways at ABC.

In the highly competitive world of TV news, finding the right anchor is crucial to a network’s brand. After running through a few pretenders, ABC had finally filled the iconic Peter Jennings’ seat on “World News Tonight” just months earlier with David Muir. ABC was perfectly poised to snatch the top spot from NBC.

During his first six months as “World News” anchor, the newly minted Muir had beaten Williams only a half-dozen times. But after Williams’ fall from grace, ABC sailed to the most-watched evening news program.

ABC executives could go for long lunches and look forward to cashing their bonus checks. Muir is young, dashing — one of People magazine’s 2014 “Sexiest Men Alive”! — and the proud recipient of the Walter Cronkite Lying In Journalism award.

Most of Williams’ fictions had been told off air. Who knew ABC execs would have to worry about Muir telling fairy tales on air?

Last week, Muir began the news with a story about the retraining of New York City police officers. In order to fulfill the new policy of not inconveniencing criminals, officers are being instructed to subdue violent suspects without harming them, apparently requiring cops to learn a series of Bolshoi ballet moves.

This would work great if American cops were London bobbies arresting council housing louts, but we have a somewhat different urban reality in the U.S. There’s no question but that the “retraining” is going to get cops killed.

Muir led off his broadcast with a recap of the event that led to the retraining: “Ferguson, Missouri: An unarmed black man, Michael Brown, is shot to death. The officer is not indicted.”

And that was it: “The officer is not indicted.”

Muir said nothing about how the whole “hands up, don’t shoot” frenzy was a lie invented by Brown’s co-conspirator: ex-con, Dorian Johnson. No mention of the fact that the officer, Darren Wilson, wasn’t indicted because he was fully exonerated in two separate investigations. 

Indeed, Muir’s description of the Ferguson incident would be anti-police bilge if given before Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had cleared Wilson of any wrongdoing.  But Muir delivered his little summary well after the DOJ’s months-long investigation had found Officer Wilson shot Brown in self-defense and was fully justified.  (If Muir spent less time posing for beefcake photos, and more time keeping up with the news, he would have known that.)

His summary — “Ferguson, Missouri: An unarmed black man, Michael Brown, is shot to death. The officer is not indicted” — is nothing short of Goebbels-like propaganda.

The public needs to know: Which of these is true?

(A) You knew that Mike Brown never had his hands up, and the only reason Officer Wilson wasn’t indicted is that there was absolutely no reason to do so — but you just didn’t give a crap.

Or:

(B) You didn’t know any of that.

If — after all the Sturm und Drang over Ferguson — Muir didn’t know his summary was a lie, then ABC’s evening news anchor has kept himself so ignorant of current events that he really should be filing reports about seat cushions and lint filters in America, and kept a million miles away from the news.

But it’s also possible that Muir simply promoted the left-wing, anti-cop agenda of ABC News for his own job security.

We’re dying to know which it is. When you have a moment, Dave, drop us a tweet and let us know.

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