Walter Lippmann
(1894-1974)

(Reading: Lippmann’s “Public Opinion”)

Introduction

Work

• “A Preface to Politics” (1913)
• “Drift and Mastery” (1914)
• “Public Opinion” (1922)
• “The Phantom Public” (1925)
• “A Preface to Morals” (1929)
• “The Good Society” (1937)
• “The Cold War” (1947)

Public Opinion (1922)

The Triangular Relationship

The Pictures in Our Head

• “For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations.” (16)
• “He (any individual) is learning to see with his mind vast proportions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.” (29)
• “We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him”. (25)
• “For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.” (14)
• “It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response. But because it is behavior, the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment where action eventuates … For certainly, what is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.” (15)
• “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern the whole process of perception.” (90)
• “For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us.” (81)
• “The stereotypes are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope.” (119)
• “A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.” (96)

Public Opinion Defined

• “Public Opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts” (125)

Newspapers / Mass Media

• “Universally it is admitted that the press is the chief means of contact with the unseen environment.” (320)
• “The most important of these is that each of us tends to judge a newspaper, if we judge it at all, by its treatment of that part of the news in which we feel involved ourselves.” (328)
• “The newspaper deals with a multitude of events beyond our experience. But it deals also with some events within our experience. And by its handling of those events we most frequently decide to like it or dislike it, to trust it or to refuse to have the sheet in the house. If the newspaper gives a satisfactory account of that which we think we know, our business, our church, our party, it is fairly certain to be immune from violent criticism by us. What better criterion does the man at the breakfast table posses than the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion?” (329)
• “Ethically, a newspaper is judged as if it were a church or a school.” (321)
• “A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers.” (323f)
• “A newspaper that can really depend upon the loyalty of its readers is as independent as a newspaper can be, given the economics of modern journalism.” (326)
• “Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis each shall we have.” (354)
• “The fact that is sensational to the reader is the fact that almost every journalist will seek.” (351)
• “News which does not offer this opportunity to introduce oneself into the struggle which it depicts cannot appeal to a wide audience. The audience must participate in the news, much as it participates in the drama, by personal identification.” (355)

News and Truth – The Panacea of Democracy

• “… news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to the light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” (358)
• “But the journalist has no such support in his own conscience or in fact. The control exercised over him by the opinions of his employers and his readers, is not the control of truth by prejudice, but of one opinion by another opinion that is not demonstrably less true.” (361)
• “The newspapers are regarded by democrats as a panacea for their own defects, whereas analysis of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.” (32)
• “The press, in other words, has come to be regarded as an organ of direct democracy, charged on a much wider scale, and from day to day, with the function attributed to the initiative, referendum, and recall. The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time. It is not workable. And when you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable.” (363)

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