“How to Start Winning the Information War” was the headline put onto a commentary in The Washington Post last month by the late Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who died this March, and former Sen. Gordon Humphries.

Modestly presented, it stands apart as one of the most important messages that has been carried on the Post’s opinion pages in a long time, lamenting the failure of pro-democratic institutions to “go on the offensive” in the all-out war being waged by the enemies of democracy — Russia, China, Iran, and I’ll add surrogates like Hamas and nihilist elements in the West, such as Trump — in “the newest battlefield, the human mind.”

“No one is in charge of telling America’s still-inspiring story to the world,” they note, leaving the field to the likes of Putin, who “brazenly floods the airwaves and computers around the world daily with malicious falsehoods…and false narratives designed to sow confusion about our institutions, including our elections.” (They don’t include Trump here, but it is obvious he ought to be.)

They point out that false narratives need to be met with a robust counter narrative. But now, since the loss of the U.S. Information Agency as of 1999 (Biden being one of only 40 Senators to vote against abolishing the USIA at the time), Putin enjoys “high standing in domestic polls and in some non-aligned countries,” as Trump does in the U.S. for the same reasons.

The Lieberman-Humphrey commentary reminded us all, including this newspaperman, that “news, by itself, is not counter narrative. It is not the marshaling of truth and fact to tell our story.”

A true counter narrative in the information war “asserts our values and ideals, and explains the priceless advantages of freedom, the rule of law, a free press and freedom to assemble and express opinion,” in ways that go beyond the issues where partisanship divides.

I contend that this is the proper way to present the news of the day, as well. It is in the crucible of freedom — I dare say of the “4 Freedoms” that President Franklin Roosevelt articulated at the outset of World War II: freedom of speech and religion, and from fear and want – that meaning is added to “news” to make it all truly matter.

No doubt the enemies of democracy and freedom use the appearance of “news” as a ruse to undercut us, as we see in the modern era of Fox News, Newsmax and others, exactly as Putin, Xi and other tyrants use “state news” to impose “slants” that advance their purposes.

Yet it seems that the only counter to this is non-value infused “news,” which tells us how many babies a zoo animal has had, and what the weather looks like for the next few days, but which does not ground its presentation in a context of relevance for defending our democratic institutions.

In the better days of fighting for democracy, in the years following World War 2, the three TV networks then vied for viewership in their entertainment and sports programming to attract advertising dollars, but when it came to presenting the “news,” none of the nightly newscasts allowed advertising on the valid notion that it could and probably would taint it. News that buoyed the spirits of free citizens in a democratic nation should not be compromised by the almighty dollar.

This did not mean that it was held as a slave to a premeditated prejudice, the way Fox is today, but that true newsmen called the shots on what made it to the airwaves. Those were the days of Edward R. Murrow and the great role he played in exposing to the public the tawdry and dishonest tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s, for example.

My newspaper, as it should in my view, does more than report the outcome of the previous night’s games, as valued such a service might be in the eyes of many. No, its headlines and leading stories are often designed to help the readers see what’s at stake in some new development from the standpoint of the cherished values we all are the beneficiaries of and share.

They slant to democracy.