I come, not to disagree, but to reinforce your final paragraph. Last night I stumbled over the last 20 minutes of this:

http://www.kqed.org/program...

piece of vile propaganda in which several retired former child-actors pined nostalgically for the halcyon days of moral order represented by <i>Leave It To Beaver</i>, <i>My Three Sons</i> and <i>Lost in Space</i>...in which they, themselves, appeared. Serious nauseated, I trudged on clear to the end, realizing that I truly believe in the gradual awakening of American eyes that are more than hungry for the very variety of transparency that must eventually detect and check the obscure excesses of organizations like the AMPTP, Camcast, NewsCorp...because they just can't stop flinging it.

"In 1613. the Jesuits began publishing their Jesuit Relations, which were immensly popular in France; and profits from the books helped promote the work of the Jesuit order" (in the New World) "spurring the priests to keep sending reports"..."the Jesuits brought the stories about adventures with Indians to France in great detail and complexity...Some Jesuit writers elaborated on the theme of the 'noble savage', and pointed to numerous advantages of Indian life, including example of the freedom of the individual. In general, the Jesuit writings helped to inform a growing intellectual movement in France that would build upon the ideals of egalitarianism and the dignity of the individual."
In its first essay, Oren Lyons (writing in Exiled in the Land of the Free) identifies the Baron de Lahontan, whose New Voyages to North America (1693) was for decades one of the most important works on North America; more of the noble savage schtick, with emphasis on impolitic honesty.

"Missing from the accounts (of European and Euro-American historians) is the story of how egalitarian American Indian societies stimulated the thinking of European philosophers of the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that provided American colonists with some of the foundations for their rebillion against the English monarchy."
--Lyons