The striking development is not that the veracity of some is open to doubt, but that this forgivingly collusive arrangement has now broken down: not the fact of lying, but the naming of it.
Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert, in an open letter to sportswriter Jay Mariotti, who quit the paper to become a TV reporter and told an interviewer that "newspapers are dead".
It is responsible discretion exercised in the national interest to prevent unnecessary disclosure of eminently justifiable procedures in which untimely revelation could severely impair public confidence.
Pillars of the state, such as the Office of Government Ethics, were accustomed to compliance from the White House and ill-equipped to counter open defiance.