If an American interrogator of Japanese prisoners desecrated the most sacred Japanese symbols during World War II, it is inconceivable that any American media would have published this information. While American news media were just as interested in scoops in 1944 as they are now, they also had a belief that when America was at war, publishing information injurious to America and especially to its troops was unthinkable.

To the extent that the left is still vibrant, I am suggesting that it has mutated into something else. If what used to be known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent, it is the global media. The global media’s demand for peace and justice, which flows subliminally like an intravenous solution through its reporting, is — much like the Communist International’s rousing demand for workers’ rights — moralistic rather than moral. Peace and justice are such general and self-evident principles that it is enough merely to invoke them. Any and all toxic substances can flourish within them, or manipulate them, provided that the proper rhetoric is adopted. For moralizers these principles are a question of manners, not of substance. To wit, Kofi Annan can never be wrong.

Still, CNN — and in particular, CNN International — cannot be defined simply as a left-wing network. Look at the latter’s exotic female anchors, so chic and exquisitely made-up. Rosa Luxemburg never looked like that. CNN International is a global cosmopolitan network, just as Fox News is an old-fashioned nation-state network gaudied up by the latest technology (and because the meatloaf world of the old nation-state will remain feisty for a few decades yet, Fox has hit a gold mine2). Global cosmopolitanism is a world of multiple passport holders and others whose business and income give them easy access to many countries even as they have less and less of a stake in any particular one of them. Just as journalists are not bureaucratically accountable for their views — disseminated with all the power brought to bear by new technology — global cosmopolitans are increasingly unaccountable to geographical space, or to a specific government, or even to fellow voters. Their friends and acquaintances are spread throughout the planet, and with less of a stake in geography, they are dull to pleas of national interest even as they are alive to those of “humanity.” That is to say, they represent the well-worried. As Somerset Maugham remarked in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), moral indignation always contains an element of self-satisfaction.