Walter Lippmann

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Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an influential United States writer, journalist, and political commentator.

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[edit] Early life

Lippmann was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. The family lived a comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual family trips to Europe were the rule.

At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas. He concentrated on philosophy and languages (he spoke both German and French) and graduated after only three years of study.

[edit] Journalism and Democracy

Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and a philosopher who argued that true democracy is a goal that can't be reached in a complex, industrial world.

In 1913 Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, Lippmann became an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points.

Lippmann had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had no sympathy for communism. But the Golos spy ring used Mary Price, his secretary, to garner information on items Lippmann chose not to write about or names of Lippmann's sources, often not carried in stories, but of use to the MGB (USSR). He examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuarcies and other problems. Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that the New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was neither unbiased nor accurate. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize-winning column "Today and Tomorrow," he published several books. Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people -- including journalists -- are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas in to symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation." Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.

Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as "intelligence work." Within this role, journalists are a link between policymakers and the public. A journalist seeks facts from policymakers which they then transmit to citizens who form a public opinion. In this model, the information may be used to hold policymakers accountable to citizens. This theory was spawned by the industrial era and some critics argue the model needs rethinking in post-industrial societies.

Though a journalist himself, he held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” A journalist’s version of the truth is subjective and limited to how he constructs his reality. The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”

Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy. He embraced the Jeffersonian ideal and believed that the American people would become intellectually engaged in political and world issues and fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of industrialization, the events leading to World War II and the concomitant scourge of totalitarianism however, he rejected this view. Democratic ideals had deteriorated, voters were uninstructed as to issues and policies, they lacked the competence to participate in public life and were disinterested in participating in the political process. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that the stability the government achieved during the patronage era of the 1800s was threatened by modern realities. He wrote that a “governing class” must rise to face the new challenges. He saw the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd – floundering in the “chaos of local opinions."

The basic problem of democracy, he wrote, was the accuracy of news and protection of sources. He argued that distorted information was inherent in the human mind. People make up their minds before they define the facts, while the ideal would be to gather and analyze the facts before reaching conclusions. By seeing first, he argued, it is possible to sanitize polluted information. Lippmann argued that seeing through stereotypes (a word he coined) subjected us to partial truths. Lippmann called the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs a "false ideal." He compared the political savvy of an average man to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain.

Lippmann said the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. The experts, who often are referred to as "elites," were to be a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omnicompetent citizen". Modern critics of journalism and democracy say that history has borne out Lippmann's model. The power of the governing elites, they argue, stretches from the early days of the 20th century to the New Deal of the 1930s to today.

Lippmann came to be seen as Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis. Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrases for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent. Philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed that the public (a composite of many “publics” within society) could form a “Great Community” that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems.

Following the removal from office of Henry A. Wallace in September 1946, Lippman became the leading public advocate of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, in juxtaposition to the containment strategy being advocated at the time by people like George F. Kennan.

See also: Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays

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[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

  • McAllister, Ted V. (1996). Revolt against modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin & the search for postliberal order. Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas. ; pp. 58-68; ISBN 0-7006-0740-4.
  • Riccio, Barry D. (1994). Walter Lippmann - Odyssey of a liberal. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1-56000-096-1.
  • Steel, Ronald (1980). Walter Lippmann and the American century. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-7658-0464-6.

[edit] External links

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