Just the facts, ma'am

I have a hard time these days, as I am sure many do, finding unvarnished facts. Even in the age of the Internet locating primary sources is difficult if not impossible. A quote from a newsworthy person is always made up of words selected by whoever publishes the interview; writings are excerpted or Dowdified in ways that suit the user. But in reading the lead article in my November/December Foreign Affairs magazine I encountered some of the most biased and blinkered writing I've seen in a major journal. The article, 'The Sources of American Legitimacy', is written by Robert Tucker, Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins, and David Hendrickson, a professor at Colorado College. These two pillars of academe should be aware of historical precedents and should have the time to raise their heads and take a look around. But this is what they write:

...there can be no doubt that legitimacy is a vital thing to have, and illegitimacy a condition devoutly to be avoided.
How to restore legitimacy has thus become a central question for U.S. foreign policy...If the United States is going to be successful in recapturing legitimacy, it will have to abandon the doctrines and practices that brought it to this pass.

You can probably see where this is going already, but I have trouble with a basic assumption the authors have made, and that is that legitimacy is something that is bestowed upon one's actions by others; in this case, Europeans bestowing it upon the United States. A moral man is led by his own lights. Certainly others may judge his words or actions, but the moral man does not submit his deeds for judgment prior to making them. What makes the stamp of legitimacy desirable? Why is there "no doubt that legitimacy is a vital thing to have"? These are questions which are not addressed by the authors. The reader is asked to assume: a) legitimacy is vital; and, b) it is given to the U.S. by others.

There's a lot more: "Even when the administration approached international institutions it did so with an air of feigned regard but real contempt." or "In truth, the Bush administration did not care a fig for whether the war was lawful." and on and on. But given assumptions a) and b), the rest of the article follows.

I'm looking for information, facts both current and pulled from history, that will inform my thinking on any given topic. What I find more often is increasingly vitriolic opinion. This leads to deceptive or sloppy writing, and when I see signs of that, I am put off and the journal is put down.