Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion

Remedial Media

Dear Friends,

I’m teaching a Media Studies course at the moment and may occasionally share reflections on material that comes up in the course.

Best,

Sam

WALTER LIPPMANN’S ‘PUBLIC OPINION’

Lippmann is one of these people who seems to have been destined to slip into the mists of history. He entered Harvard at 16, his questions as an undergraduate so impressed his professor Graham Wallas that Wallas dedicated his book to him. His career in journalism was launched when Lincoln Steffens, scouring the country for a cub reporter, visited Harvard in search of “the ablest mind that could express himself in writing” — and had Lippmann unanimously recommended to him by the students and professors he canvassed. Lippmann’s career from there was one triumph after another — 20 books, 4,000 columns, every imaginable journalistic prize. He seems to have coined the terms ‘stereotype,’ ‘Cold War,’ and ‘manufacture of consent.’ The ‘Manhattan Zeus’ was a fairly typical encomium for him. In popular culture, he shows up in a Rodgers and Hart song and, in a New Yorker cartoon where one liberal matron declares to another, “Of course I only take a cup of coffee in the morning. A cup of coffee and Walter Lippmann is all I need.”

The Manhattan Zeus

It somehow seems hard to imagine reading Lippmann now, in the same way that it’s impossible to imagine somebody a hundred years from now cracking open, say, Cass Sunstein. But I’m teaching a Media Studies course and had a vague idea of Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) as being the first significant work of journalistic theory.

Probably not read in 100 years

And Public Opinion, dated as it is, turns out to be better, more prophetic and more alarming, than I would have expected.

The book’s enduring legacy is in the phrase “the pictures in your head,” which you may have come across at some point or other. Lippmann’s argument is that people have almost no relationship to grounded experience — that people get their ideas of public life from these mental pictures, which tend to emerge from a fog of manipulative external inputs and from self-comforting confirmation biases. Here is how Lippmann describes that miasma:

The artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and, finally, the fear of facing those facts which seem to threaten the established routine of men’s lives.

In class, being slightly less flowery, we tried to put together a chart of why people are as stupid as they are and came up with something like the following schema. Stupidity starts, of course, with ignorance, but as people start learning things the, like, Krebs cycle of stupidity only begins. What people learn tends to feed their ego. They take in inputs favorable to their existing way of thinking and rigorously exclude anything external to it. Prejudices, stereotypes, and biases find ample confirmation in any received input — as Lippmann pithily puts it, “we do not first see and then define, we define and then see.” But, as people exit their own mental villages and enter into a global information culture, that’s where the trouble really picks up. It is precisely this kind of externalized mental image — ‘public opinion’ — which is where people are weakest and most vulnerable to manipulation. And the very basis of democracy — or, if you prefer, statecraft in the age of masses — hinges on the spread of this highly compromised information.

“Stupidity starts in the streets.”

For Lippmann, this whole cycle is an insoluble problem. The press can only serve the public, in a self-reinforcing loop. Mass media not only creates a general pablum but unduly influences leaders. This was Lippmann’s interpretation of what happened in World War I — that the war leaders of the various adversaries came to believe their own optimistic propaganda. And if democracy is inherently limited by mass media — as Lippmann astutely writes, “no matter how power originates, the crucial interest is in how power is exercised” — far worse is to come from unscrupulous leaders (Lippmann was in this case prescient about Hitler) who use the whole morass of stereotypes, propaganda, and group-think to create a self-perpetuating myth. For Lipppmann, the myth is at the apex of the whole Krebs cycle of stupidity. He writes, “The distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error, fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of credibility….What a myth never contains is the critical power to celebrate its truths from its errors.”

Lippmann’s diagnosis of the problem is hard to argue with. His solution, though, leaves something to be desired. At a place of intra-textual despair, Lippmann writes:

The lesson is, I think, a fairly clear one….The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This class acts upon information that is not common property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive.

The next question would, of course, be who these experts are, how they are credentialed, who pays them, what keeps them from being seduced by their own group-think. As Michael Curtis, who wrote the introduction to a reissue of Public Opinion, politely puts it, “Lippmann never commented on the problem that specialists also have pictures in their heads.”

James Thurber cartoon, 1943

But if Lippmann’s vision seems airily utopic, it did, to a surprising extent, get fulfilled. The heroic public servants of the Roosevelt administration, virtually the entirety of modern ‘social science,’ the vast blob of Washington think tanks and policy centers, etc, can be thought of as an extension of what Lippmann had in mind. And, to a surprising extent, our whole political discourse at the moment is a sort of referendum on Lippmann, an attempt to roll back Lippmann’s achievement. When the establishment charges the periphery with ‘misinformation,’ they are largely repeating Lippmann’s idea of the limitations of ‘public opinion’ and of how easily stereotypes and prejudices can be molded into a myth by the unscrupulous past masters of mass media. When the periphery, on the other hand, takes aim at the ‘establishment,’ what they largely mean is this self-appointed body of public servants who, on the whole, didn’t exist in 1922 but would become a fact of political life within a couple of decades. And, in that critique, the periphery is zeroing in exactly on the hole in Lippmann’s thinking — his inability to grapple with the question of accountability for the ‘experts.’

What may be of most interest to us as we continue to hash all these questions out — in our debates about ‘fact-checking,’ ‘misinformation,’ ‘the deep state,’ et al — is how avowedly anti-democratic Lippmann was. “At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions,” he startlingly wrote. “The trouble lies deeper than the press and so does the remedy. It lies in social organization based on a system of analysis and record and in all the corollaries of that principle: in the abandonment of the theory of the omnicompetent citizen, in the decentralization of decision, in the coordination of decision by comparable record and analysis.”

What comes across with Lippmann is the same idea that emerged in liberal circles in the panic after 2016 — the belief that the unhinged public sphere (mass media in Lippmann’s time, social media in ours) resulted in a cesspool of populism and had invalidated itself and that salvation came from setting up guardrails against the effects of public opinion and restoring decision-making to a qualified expert class possessive of what Lippmann calls “the machinery of knowledge.” It’s a tempting diagnosis and cure — and Lippmann turned out to be more right than wrong in an era of populism and totalitarianism — but there are real limitations to Lippmann’s theory, as is evident just from reading Public Opinion, and that show up again, in no better-thought-through-form, in liberalism’s effort post-2016 to close off the commons.