The people speak.(Beat the Press)

Katie Couric couldn't believe it. Bowing to public pressure, CBS had just pulled the plug on "The Reagans," its $9 million doomed foray into non-reality TV. The decision was such big news that even rival networks were dissecting it, and NBC's sprightly "Today" hostess pronounced herself simply astonished by "all this brouhaha."

"I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this," she sniffed, echoing a sentiment expressed widely throughout much of the media: This was something new, something big, something hitherto unimaginable--audiences getting riled up about the entertainment media, and media mucky-mucks buckling under.

But if Couric and company had never seen anything like this, it could only be because they weren't paying attention. After all, this is America, home of the perpetually outraged. We do this sort of thing all the time.

Jewish activists have waged a preemptive war against Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Gay activists fought to get Dr. Laura off TV. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton tried to edit jokes about Rosa Parks out of the home-video versions of Barbershop.

Protesting the media is a national, bipartisan pastime, the peculiar ritual by which modern American society defines its ever-shifting boundary between good and bad taste. It's also a democratic process, which is why PETA's protests against California's "happy cows" ad campaign has largely gone ignored, and why public disgust with Bill Maher led to ABC's termination of his show "Politically Incorrect." More often than not, majority sentiment wins out.

It may not all be healthy, but it's certainly not new. For better or for worse, it's the American way. Yet to hear various establishment media organs tell it, the effort on the part of ordinary citizens to block CBS' artless smear of a beloved President suffering from Alzheimer's disease is more like something out of the old USSR--literally.

The New York Times editorial page, which condescendingly noted that Reagan's "supporters credit him with forcing down the Iron Curtain"--as opposed to acknowledging that the former President might actually ...