Brian Williams’s just-announced resignation from NBC doesn’t really matter. Other than depriving MSNBC of a familiar, marketable face at a time of plummeting ratings, and when a number of its major stars have one foot out the door, it’s not going to change anything about the network. Nor is it going to change anything about the poisonous, profit-driven dynamics of cable news, easily the most powerful disseminators of misinformation in today’s politics, something Williams participated in with relish.

But it’s worth dwelling on, because Williams embodies one of the more noxious and pervasive trends in not just US news media, but American life more generally: the normalization of serious ethical breaches and the lack of any serious accountability for people with wealth, power, or influence.

As you’ll read and hear today in many stories covering Williams’s resignation, he was suspended and demoted by NBC in 2015 for “exaggerating an anecdote about a helicopter ride in Iraq” or telling “an inaccurate story about his helicopter’s having been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.” This is technically true, but the facts of the scandal here are presented so misleadingly that it rivals Williams’s own infamous bullshittery.