They were some of the most horrifying pictures ever to grace the front pages: pregnant women, shell-shocked and bloodied, being helped through the rubble of a bombed hospital. One of them died not long after losing her unborn baby. The other survived and gave birth. So far as we know, she and her daughter are still trapped in Mariupol, the Ukrainian city besieged and flattened by Russian bombs.

The photos did not just appear by magic. They were taken by the last pair of journalists still in the city working for international media. But the images collected by Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Malotka for Associated Press were considered so deadly to the Russian war machine that the journalists were put on a target list. This week, they were forced to flee Mariupol after Ukrainian soldiers warned them that, if caught by Russia, they would be put on camera and forced to recant all of their work.

The war in Ukraine has brought about one of the most intense propaganda wars ever seen. Within days, I had to take myself off Twitter for a long break, so distressing and overwhelming was the stream of shaky footage taken over people’s kitchen sinks of missiles landing and children bursting into screams, some of it mixed up with old footage from years ago or jumbled in alongside long screeds about Nazi battalions and Nato imperialism.

A large contingent online are determined to claim that every image of horror out of Ukraine is part of a Western government operation. An opposing contingent won’t hear a word about any Ukrainian setbacks and spreads Kyiv’s military propaganda with abandon. A small minority, like the blog Bellingcat, carefully picks apart and verifies the flood of information, sorting truth from fiction.

But as with almost everything in this war, this conflict over basic facts serves to remind us of something the culture wars had almost made us forget: the West’s values, like a free press, are worth defending, even worth dying for. Whatever our problems, our system is better than the alternatives.

This needs restating because although it has always been fashionable to denounce the media, the intensification of the culture wars and the long period of peace we have enjoyed seem to have made this habit more popular than ever. There is nothing more modish than declaring that the “mainstream media” are all liars and goons spreading propaganda on behalf of our globalist Davos masters. Whatever your preferred flavour of hatred, there is something out there for you.

Perhaps you’re one of the ones who believe we have all been brainwashed to destroy and denounce Donald Trump and cover up a stolen election. Maybe you think we’re in thrall to the Israel lobby, orchestrating a witch hunt against Jeremy Corbyn. Or you believe it’s the Russia-funded Brexiteers who are really in charge, executing a masterplan to turn Britain into an oligarchic tax haven, or else you think it’s the “globohomo”, net zero, Europhile elites who are pulling our strings, relentlessly promoting the new trans religion, cancelling statues and defending Nato expansionism. Let me tell you, it’s all in a day’s work.

The truth is that we live in a free society with a flawed, but free media. That is why you are allowed to watch videos of John Mearsheimer, an American professor of international relations, blaming the US and Nato expansion for the war, and weigh up his arguments. That is also why you can march in protest against the Government or call Boris Johnson a liar without being imprisoned or fined. That is why you can get constantly irritated by the BBC or encounter offensive, sloppy, controversial journalism and opinions on your phone any day of the week. Like any society or class, our citizens and media are susceptible to groupthink, bias, mob frenzies or botched legislation. And thanks to the internet, more people than ever can scrutinise the media, expose its flaws or compete with it.

But there is one salient feature of the media in the free world that is absent in most of the rest: we do not throw people in jail simply for denouncing the king or saying what they think. I dread to think what fate would otherwise await Dominic Cummings.

It is worth pondering this, because Russia’s war in Ukraine is not just a territorial battle. It is an ideological war. Across the world, the West and its ideas are widely seen to be in decline. Plenty of people abroad – and even here – blame Nato for the war and see Kyiv as a failing puppet of Western “globalism”. The Syrian “red line” debacle, the Afghan retreat, the poor handling of Covid, the culture wars, our economic stagnation and our decadence and weakness have sent the message out that the empire of liberalism is crumbling – and good riddance too.

Rival centres of power, whether in Moscow or Beijing, are selling the world on the idea that the West’s notions of freedom, truth and human rights are nothing but hypocrisy and propaganda. This is how Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov can claim with a straight face that the US is planning to drop chemical weapons on Ukraine. He represents a system where it would be impossible for a Russian newspaper to expose, as The New York Times did in Afghanistan, that his own government mistakenly murdered an innocent family of civilians due to botched intelligence. When Moscow does such things, just as when it sends thousands of its own troops recklessly to their deaths, most Russians never even hear about it.

But just as with the protesters in Hong Kong waving British and American flags, it is left to outsiders to remind the free world what it stands for. We can look to Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian TV producer who staged an anti-war protest live on air before being bundled into a police car, taken away and fined. We can watch Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky dismissively turn down the US offer of an evacuation and prepared to die defending his country. We can witness Russia’s anti-war protesters or soft-spoken critics like Ioann Burdin, a priest fined for calling the invasion a war that is “unacceptable”, rather than referring to a “special operation” as Russian law now requires. “As a Christian, I open the Gospel and look for the word ‘special operation’. There’s no such word,” he said. “There is the word ‘war’ though.”

Or, if we want, we can look at none of these things and instead go online and stream Russia Today 24 hours a day into our living rooms. All of this is what makes the free world more adaptable, more accountable and more committed to truth than any tinpot dictatorship, rabid theocracy or police state on Earth. Then again, that’s just what a fully paid-up, pre-programmed Nato propagandist would say.