Recent events indicate that Americans are finally recovering from their long-standing love affair with the establishment news media. Many of us remember the respect that our parents and grandparents accorded the news establishment a generation or so ago. News reports of World War II are among this writer’s early memories: the family gathered around the Philco or the Emerson radio set in the evening, hanging on every word of news from the war fronts. The idea that those reports could have been false or distorted would never have occurred to us. We needed that information, and the obligation to report it truthfully to those of us supporting the war effort at home was assumed to be a rock-solid part of the contract—like our own obligation to support our troops by buying war bonds and giving up luxuries like sugar and coffee, butter, gasoline, car parts, tires—and our sons and daughters.

The outrageous media gymnastics exercised today with regard to truthful reporting was summed up by Denis Boyles, writing for National Review (“Grim Tales,” Jan. 28, 2005): “These days, disputing what any fool can plainly see is a sacred calling in the global press . . .”

Boyles notes what a growing population of consumers have noted to be a current practice among members of the establishment media: if you don’t like the way things are unfolding in the world around you, you have three choices. You can (a) write the story that comports with your own view; (b) take a poll to validate your view of things; or (c) extrapolate a reality that pleases you.

A global poll conducted before the U.S. election this past November and transmitted gleefully around the world was a good example. It showed Kerry the clear leader—among people who could not vote in the election. (Ah, well, does this small distinction really matter?) Obviously, George W. Bush won handily, but late in January, these self-appointed “reality makers” of the media extracted their revenge, grinding out a rancorous reprisal in the Guardian, insisting that Bush really did lose—at least in the eyes of a self-righteous, moralizing global press: “The survey also indicated for the first time that dislike of Mr. Bush is translating into a dislike of Americans in general.”

But as another writer (Victor David Hanson, “The Disenchanted American,” Jan. 7, 2005) has pointed out, the world scene would be very different had there been no Americans during the past 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would have nukes today—to use as they please on other pontificating, moralizing members of the world community. Afghanistan would still exist as a seventh-century Islamic terrorist gristmill, exporting their murderous breed of Zarqawi and Bin Laden minions worldwide. The likes of Noriega, Milosevic, Saddam, and Khadafi would be adjudicating human rights at the UN. Bosnia and Kosovo would simulate Pol Pot’s Cambodia—national graveyards that attest to the horrifying inhumanity of unrestrained evil. And Saddam would strut proudly as controller of half the world’s oil deposits and producer of increasingly dangerous reserves of nuclear and biological weaponry. European arms sales to Arab dictators of his ilk might well have produced a second holocaust. And on and on.

Americans know these things, and they are beginning to accept the fact that their considerable sacrifices have earned them the snarling ingratitude of much of the world. Do they care? Probably a good less than they did a decade or so ago. We are not all fools.

Amid the death and misery of the world, there is a pathological, truth-defying “new reality” that festers like a disease in the global media. It casts Israel as a malevolent outcast, unfit to render her proffered aid and comfort following the Tsunami disaster. A haughty and ill-informed Norwegian UN bureaucrat implied in a news item broadcast around the world that the U.S. was “stingy” in its response to the Tsunami suffering. His hasty comment, when seen in the light of America’s actual generosity in response to that tragedy, is seen for what such small-minded commentary often is: a petulant, envious bias toward America. Our detractors abroad are quite willing to ignore the fact that American contributions from government aid, private donations, and the enormous cost of U.S. military manpower and equipment to deliver aid from around the world will top what a good many others nations together have contributed. But where in the global media is there any recognition of this reality?

A benevolent America, which had already freed Afghanistan and brought down Saddam, is judged by our “moral superiors” in Europe and elsewhere to be a despicable criminal for her “crime” of locking up a mass murderer and insuring, by the spilling of our own sons and daughters’ blood, that elections would finally be held in a place that had not, in all of its history, experienced real freedom.

And besides our alleged crimes in the matter of “imposed democracy,” there is the “new reality” of America’s alleged moral equivalency with Nazi Germany and other regimes that have slaughtered millions in their orgies of bloody expediency. There was recently a sleazy bit of this “new reality” (clipped from the German press and published on the web at TAZ) in which the writer gleefully posits his smug conclusion that there really is a connection between Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib: “The torture scandal of the U.S. army in Abu Ghraib shows that sadism has a place in civilized nations, while Guantanamo Bay proves that the principle of the concentration camp . . . today is upheld with pride by the leading nation of the civilized world.” Now that’s a “reality” than any good German Socialist, happily insulated in full-blown denial of his own nation’s fairly recent history and disgusted with George W. Bush’s lofty ideals of freedom and democracy, can support with pride.

Speaking of Germany, here’s one of our own home-grown “reality makers,” NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a piece published in the International Herald Tribune, edited and printed in Paris. (The IHT advertises itself as “the world's daily newspaper, combining the extensive resources of its own correspondents with those of The New York Times.”) In researching his piece on the subject of George W. Bush’s forthcoming trip to Europe in February, Friedman managed to assess the wide-ranging nuances of German public opinion within the confines of the Pony Club, a trendy bar in East Berlin. He rendered this verdict: “There is nothing that the Europeans want to hear from Bush, there is nothing that they will listen to from Bush that will change their minds about him or the Iraq war or U.S. foreign policy.” (Obviously, that is all the news “worth reporting” in Berlin—at least as far as the subject of George W. Bush is concerned.)

 America is willing to do what it has to do. But we are growing tired of being the bad guys. We are not swallowing the “new realities” of global hypocrisy and leftist media that cast every action on the part of the U.S. as immoral and imperialistic. Most Americans (with the exception of the misguided and delusional folks on the far Left) do not see George W. Bush’s vision of eradicating tyranny worldwide as impractical or over-reaching. In a world increasingly inhabited by vicious, well-funded and mobile barbarians, our security is becoming more dependent than ever on two things: First of all, there is the necessity for pre-emptive action on our part to destroy those elements before they destroy us. Secondly, President Bush emphasized the necessity to support democratic movements with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. That, he said, “is not primarily the task of arms.”

The view of the world’s “new realists,” who cynically reject every common-sense, ennobling or edifying approach to governance, is that we can do business with dictators and despots, all in the name of “stability.” To some extent, it is the dream of fools. But there is a more sinister level that needs to be addressed forthrightly. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were absolutely right: we do, indeed, grapple with evil empires and axes of evil. Given the opportunity, they would destroy all of us, our Constitution, our form of government, and our way of life because this nation is the only thing that stands in the way of their obnoxious plans for world dominance.

Ultimately, it is not the cynics and global planners who lead nations and peoples to higher places. It is the visionaries who are remembered with gratitude long after their time because it is they who have called us to boldly embrace the concept of freedom and liberty for all, recognizing that this is only real remedy for tyranny.