Today James O’Keefe and I had the privilege to go on ABC News’ Good Morning America to launch O’Keefe’s new set of undercover videos – the Census. While most of the feedback email of the contentious segment is running negative against George Stephanopoulos for emphasizing long debunked and retracted smears and for using the word “criminal” throughout the piece, what is missing is an acknowledgment of how courageous Stephanopoulos was to put O’Keefe and me on the air in the first place.

ABC NEWS and Stephanopoulos are not immune from partisan propaganda campaigns to ignore points of view that run counter to their already center-left mainstream media line. In fact, Stephanopoulos himself was the person who delayed the mainstream media’s report on the Clinton/Lewinsky story by stopping Bill Kristol in his tracks on ABC News’ This Week in January, 1998. He was also the political operative who internally attacked ABC News brass for booking former White House FBI agent and New York Times bestseller, Gary Aldrich. Twice Stephanopoulos tried to use his political skills to kill a story.

Today was different.

With foreknowledge of the Stephanopoulos’s treachery against his political ilk, Media Matters issued the following warning hours before our 7:30am appearance on Tuesday: “Memo to media: Do not trust Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe.” Because, by having us on, Stephanopoulos was defying his former key ally and Media Matters founder John Podesta’s wishes. Certainly, Stephanopoulos took the tack of the good partisan during the interview. But he allowed O’Keefe and me to refute his partisan talking points.

What conservatives want is a chance to tell their stories, not to ensure that those stories are always presented without criticism or skepticism. And by playing the skeptic and the critic, Stephanopoulos was allowed to do what he couldn’t do when he ran interference for his former boss, Bill Clinton: He launched the Census story.

When Stephanopoulos gives O’Keefe credit for the success of the ACORN undercover stings, he is referring to a story that ABC News and the rest of the network news divisions worked hard to ignore, all whom refused to invite O’Keefe and Hannah Giles on the air to tell their side.

While Twitter is abuzz that ABC News slammed O’Keefe and stepped on the best revelations of the Census tapes which appear at Big Government, the bigger picture seems to be lost. George Stephanopoulos is granted redemption today for his past sins against good journalism. And he got to maintain his liberal street cred at the same time.

The beauty of Stephanopoulos’s launching the Census story is that it now gives James O’Keefe a higher media profile. It will be harder and harder for his partisan peers to ignore him with subsequent videos — all which show rampant corruption in the government. And the Census videos, while damning and illumnating, represent only the beginning of the Big Government census investigation, not the end.

My only real criticism is that his false, defamatory and debunked “racism” line of inquiry would have looked absurd if James O’Keefe’s colleague on the Census project, Shaughn Adeleye, had been sitting next to him instead of me. We offered to have him on over me. But ABC felt I was a better fit. I wonder why. Here’s a photo of Shaughn. I’ll let you decide:

After the Good Morning America segment aired we received dozens of tips of similar and even more far-reaching fraud at the Census. Those tips would not have been generated but for George Stephanopoulos.