I agree that it seems like fallacy to think there was some golden age of neutrality (iirc Ben Franklin bought newspapers which he used to stir up revolution), I'd be curious to here which era supposedly had neutrality.

However there are degrees, and this does NOT mean that neutrality is not worth fighting for. The points about authoritarian states serve to highlight how much worse it could be without a constant pressure toward objectivity (or as close as we can get).