Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an influential American writer, journalist, and political commentator. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... is the 266th day of the year (267th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1889 (MDCCCLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Sunday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar). ... is the 348th day of the year (349th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the 1974 Gregorian calendar. ... A writer is anyone who creates a written work, although the word more usually designates those who write creatively or professionally, or those who have written in many different forms. ... For other uses, see Journalist (disambiguation). ... A political commentator is a figure in the news media who publically airs their interpretation of events in the politics of a state or institution. ...

Early life

Lippmann was born in a big mac box.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. Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, 2005 New York City (officially named the City of New York) is the most populous city in the state of New York and the entire United States. ... For other uses, see Jew (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Europe (disambiguation). ...

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. Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... George Santayana George Santayana (December 16, 1863, Madrid – September 26, 1952, Rome), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Graham Wallas (31 May 1858 - 9 August 1932 was a social psychologist, educationalist, and a leader of the Fabian Society. ... For other uses, see Philosophy (disambiguation). ...

Journalism and Democracy

Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and a philosopher who argued that true democracy is a goal that could not 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 adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points. Herbert David Croly (January 23, 1869 - May 17, 1930) was a liberal political author. ... For other uses, see New Republic. ... “The Great War ” redirects here. ... Federal courts Supreme Court Circuit Courts of Appeal District Courts Elections Presidential elections Midterm elections Political Parties Democratic Republican Third parties State & Local government Governors Legislatures (List) State Courts Local Government Other countries Atlas  US Government Portal      For other uses, see President of the United States (disambiguation). ... Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924), was the twenty-eighth President of the United States. ... United States President Woodrow Wilson listed the Fourteen Points in a speech that he delivered to the United States Congress on January 8, 1918. ...

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 Soviet Ministry for State Security. He examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. ... Russian-born Jacob Golos (birth name Jacob Rasin orJacob Raisin) (died 1943) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet secret police operative in the USSR an longtime senior official of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) involved in icovert work and cooperation with Soviet intelligence agencies. ... Mary Wolfe Price was an American citizen and secretary to journalist Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald. ... The Ministry of State Security (MGB) ( Russian: Министерство государственной безопасности (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti)) was the name of the Soviet secret police agency from 1946 to 1953. ...

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 biased and inaccurate. 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. A Test of the News is a 1920 study done by Walter Lippmann, a US journalist and Charles Merz. ... The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. ... For other uses, see October Revolution (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation). ...

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. To his mind, democratic ideals had deteriorated, voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies, they lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for 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." Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... Forms of government Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Totalitarianism is a term employed by some scientists, especially those in the field of comparative politics, to describe modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior. ... Public Opinion is a book on media and democracy by Walter Lippmann. ... PLATO was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois (U of I) and later taken over by Control Data Corporation (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on. ...

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. The protection of sources, sometimes also referred to as the confidentiality of sources, is a right accorded to journalists under the laws of many countries, as well as under international law. ... For the term used in computing, see stereotype (UML). ...

Early on 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". Later, in "The Phantom Public," he recognized that the class of experts were also, in most respects, outsiders to particular problem, and hence, not capable of effective action. 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. Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew: אברם נועם חומסקי Yiddish: אברם נועם כאמסקי) (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. ... John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. ...

Following the removal from office of Henry A. Wallace in September 1946, Lippmann became the leading public advocate of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, as opposed to the containment strategy being advocated at the time by people like George F. Kennan. Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd Vice President of the United States (1941–45), the 11th Secretary of Agriculture (1933–40), and the 10th Secretary of Commerce (1945–46). ... George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American advisor, diplomat, political scientist, and historian, best known as the father of containment and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War. ...

See also

• Harold Lasswell
• Edward Bernays

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Walter Lippmann

The cover of Harold Lasswell on Political Sociology from the University of Chicago Press. ... Cover of Bernays 1928 book, Propaganda. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. ...

Bibliography

• A Preface to Politics (1913) ISBN 1-59102-292-4
• Drift and Mastery (1914) ISBN 0-299-10604-7
• Public Opinion (1922) ISBN 0-02-919130-0
  • Public Opinion, available at Project Gutenberg.
• The Phantom Public (1925) ISBN 1-56000-677-3
• A Preface to Morals (1929) ISBN 0-87855-907-8
• The Good Society (1937) ISBN 0-7658-0804-8
• U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943)
• U.S. War Aims (1944)
• The Cold War (1947) ISBN 0-06-131723-3
• Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955) ISBN 0-88738-791-8

Public Opinion is a book on media and democracy by Walter Lippmann. ... Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works. ... The Phantom Public is a book written in 1927 by journalist Walter Lippmann, in which he expresses his lack of faith in the democratic system, arguing that the public exists merely as an illusion, myth, and inevitably a phantom. ...

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. 

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Walter Lippmann

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of

Communication_Theory/Propaganda_and_the_Public

• USC Center on Public Diplomacy Profile
• Works by Walter Lippmann at Project Gutenberg
• Walter Lippmann Men of Destiny (1927)
• Walter Lippman FBI FOIA
• Biography with excerpt from works
• Guide to the Walter Lippmann Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library