Walter Lippmann and the

Phantom Public
by Stephen Bender
by Stephen Bender

The astounding success enjoyed by the Wilson administration in

swinging public opinion behind the United States' entry into the
First World War in 1917 had revolutionary implications for the
course and development of democracy in our country. It was the
most dramatic shift in public opinion ever recorded in American
history to that time – and it was manufactured by propaganda.

An isolationist and pacifist public was mobilized behind massive

military intervention, an eventuality Wilson had pledged to
avoid mere months earlier during his reelection campaign. In
this effort, the Wilson administration established an official
propaganda agency called the Committee on Public Information,
headed up by the progressive journalist George Creel. It
employed the leading social scientists of the day – among them a
young Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, who would become the
father of the American public relations industry a few years
later.

The previous decade had seen the rapid emergence and growth
of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World –
their successful strike in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1912 really
frightened respectable types. Then there was also the continuing
agitation of Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party – they reached their
high water mark in the amazing election of 1912 when Debs
pulled nearly 7% of the national vote running against Taft,
Roosevelt and Wilson – the ultimate winner. In addition, there
were also progressives like Senator Robert LaFollette working
the inside, along with the suffragette movement and muckraking,
melting-pot-stirring to boot.

In the years following the war, state repression – via the Sedition
Act, and Palmer raids (named for Wilson's Attorney General)
and deportations – destroyed the more radical elements and
intimidated many of the reformers. Nonetheless, leading lights in
the public square and private sector realized that repression
alone wasn't necessarily the most effective, and hence desirable,
course of action. Drawing on lessons learned from the
extraordinary triumph of war propaganda, along with the early
accomplishments of the advertising industry, social scientists
embarked on the comprehensive application of these social
psychology techniques to politics. They've never stopped since.

This in turn caused a split to resurface among liberal thinkers of

the day. One side held that the public could and should
participate in democracy. The other scoffed, maintaining that the
public was too ignorant to do any more than cast ballots once in
a while. Needless to say, corporatist-conservatives didn't then
and don't today even bother dithering with such sophistry.

The two leading figures representing these opposing positions

were, respectively, the Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey and
Walter Lippmann, a leading pundit, later to be dubbed the "Dean
of American Journalism" in mid-Century. Lippmann would
decisively win the debate he and Dewey carried on during the
1920s, backed as he was by the inexorable growth of the public
relations industry and a firmly ensconced elite consensus which
alternatively held in contempt and feared the "intrusion of the
public" into the affairs of the "responsible men."

Lippmann was an insider's insider. A prominent Harvard

graduate, he went from advocating socialism to serving on the
Creel Commission and later advising President Wilson on his
famous 14 Points at the Versailles conference. Later, he would
write the most widely read column in the country for the New
York Herald Tribune and thereafter for the Washington Post
until his death in 1974.

In a letter to the New York Review of Books in 1979, signed by

New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and then
Washington Post owner-in-waiting Katherine Graham, they
exalted in the establishment of the "Walter Lippmann House" at
Harvard. They were "happy to report" a "fitting and lasting
memorial" to "one of the great Americans of the century."

This is instructive. Some would say that Lippmann and the

liberal elite of that day were "evil" men. Who knows? Dewey
said Lippmann was a "disappointed idealist." I would agree; I
would also commend him for his honesty – the present
propagandists in power are liars through and through. His work
remains helpful for those of us who wish to continue the fight
against his legacy.

What's all this got to do with anything? Well, a lot, actually.

Ours is an era in which "spin" is not just an accepted part of
public life's scenery, it is routinely praised for its effectiveness
with no regard for its ultimate impact, as in "the Bush team is
'brilliant' at 'controlling the debate' or 'getting their message
out.'" This sorry state of affairs has been abetted – and much else
bad along with it in the economic sphere – due to corporate
control of the means and hence content of socially relevant
public information. Today, this domination has reached
historically unprecedented degree of control.

The origins of the presently stupefied state of public opinion lie

partially in the counsel given back in the day by Lippmann. His
case, addressing the "leaders" on how to deal with "the rank and
file," was laid out in two hugely influential works, Public
Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

According to the pieties that we have all been weaned on from

the first flag pledge in kindergarten right through high school
social studies class: this is the land of the freedom and liberty,
the home of the rugged individual. Unfortunately, being
bombarded with stories of the majesty and superiority of
American democracy via the corporate media – to say nothing of
the self-serving "patriotism" parroted by public officialdom –
does not make it so. Lippmann's work debunks the fairy tale that
Americans are spoon fed, giving the reader an unvarnished
account of the elite's contempt for democracy.

Propaganda 101: Leaders & Rank and File

In the lengthy excerpts which follow from Public Opinion, note

the imperious matter-of-fact tone which Lippmann maintains
throughout. He speaks of God as if he were addressing a sock
puppet. It is the voice of one secure in the knowledge of not only
what he states, but the unassailability of his depictions. No one
with any real power can contradict him.

"Because of their transcendent practical importance, no

successful leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols
which organize his following. What privileges do within the
hierarchy, symbols do for the rank and file. They conserve unity.
From the totem pole to the national flag, from the wooden idol
to God the Invisible King, from the magic word to some diluted
version of Adam Smith or Bentham, symbols have been
cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves
unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences
merged.

"The detached observer may scorn the 'star-spangled' ritual

which hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told
himself that Paris was worth a few masses. But the leader knows
by experience that only when symbols have done their work is
there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol
emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy
of real ideas blotted out. No wonder he hates what he calls
destructive criticism… for poking about with clear definitions
and candid statements serves all high purposes known to man
except the easy conservation of a common will. Poking about, as
every responsible leader suspects, tends to break the transference
of emotion from the individual mind to the institutional symbol.
And the first result of that is, as he rightly says, a chaos of
individualism and warring sects…"

Here we see succinctly expressed the sheer utility of and

cynicism with which such apparent trivialities as God, country
and patriotism are treated by the "detached observer," the leader
and his propagandists. We also notice the contempt with which
"poking around," in other words questioning, the
pronouncements of the "leader" are treated. Onward and
downward then.

"The great symbols possess by transference all the minute and

detailed loyalties of an ancient and stereotyped society. They
evoke the feeling that each individual has for the landscape, the
furniture, the faces, the memories that are his first, and in a static
society, his only reality. That core of images and devotions
without which he is unthinkable to himself, is nationality…

"Because of its power to siphon emotion out of distinct ideas,

the symbol is both a mechanism of solidarity, and a mechanism
of exploitation. It enables people to work for a common end, but
just because the few who are strategically placed must choose
the concrete objectives, the symbol is also an instrument by
which a few can fatten on many, deflect criticism, and seduce
men into facing agony for objects they do not understand.

[Is there are better description of what has happened to our

country since 9/11? Propaganda in the hands of a liberal is
distasteful and perhaps deadly; propaganda in the hands of a
fascist always results in mass murderous lies.]

"Many aspects of our subjection to symbols are not flattering if

we choose to think of ourselves as realistic, self-sufficient, and
self-governing personalities… But in the world of action they
may be beneficent, and are sometimes a necessity. The necessity
is often imagined, the peril manufactured. But when quick
results are imperative the manipulation of masses through
symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing
done. It is often more important to act than understand. It is
sometimes true that the action would fail if everyone understood
it. There are many affairs which cannot wait for a referendum or
endure publicity, and there are times, during war for example,
when a nation, an army and even its commanders must trust
strategy to a very few minds…"

This selection is particularly relevant for us today. Lippmann

points to the extent to which appeals to "nationality" can evoke
the most intimate associations, those of "memories," "faces" and
"landscape" – the "core of images and devotions." These can be
"exploited" however, for "the symbol is also an instrument by
which a few fatten on many," (Enron, et cetera) "deflect
criticism," (Osama who? Only appeasers don't want to squish
Saddam!) and "seduce men into facing agony for objects (like
going to preemptive war for "democracy" and stuff) they do not
understand."

Lippmann then shares a few tips à la Machiavelli for the leaders.

"But all leaders are not statesmen, all leaders hate to resign, and
most leaders find it hard to believe that bad as things are, the
other fellow would not make them worse… They are, therefore,
intermittently engaged in mending their fences and consolidating
their position.

"The mending of fences consists in offering an occasional

scapegoat, in redressing a minor grievance affecting a powerful
individual or faction…or [advocating] a law to stop somebody's
vices. Study the daily activity of any public official who depends
on election and you can enlarge the list… But the number of
people to whom any organization can be a successful valet is
limited, and shrewd politicians take care to attend either the
influential, or somebody so blatantly uninfluential that to pay
any attention to him is a mark of sensational magnanimity. The
far greater number, who cannot be held by favors, the
anonymous multitude, receive propaganda.

"…Every official is in some degree a censor. And since no one

can suppress information, either by concealing it or forgetting to
mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to
know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist.
Strategically placed, and compelled often to choose even at the
best between the equally cogent though conflicting ideals of
safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the official
finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in
what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know."

Again, all of what are today considered simply an instrumental

part of doing political business – finding a suitable scapegoat,
moral crusading, pandering to "uninfluentials," and the means by
which they've been discovered: polling, focus groups, spin
doctors, image consultants – are laid bare here.

Finally, Lippmann assesses the significance of propaganda for

democracy, turning the phrase later popularized by Noam
Chomsky.

"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great

refinements, no one, I think, denies. The process by which
public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has
appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation
open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

"The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one

which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of
democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved
enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis
rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological
research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the
practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking
place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic
power.
"Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs,
persuasion has become the self-conscious art and a regular organ
of popular government. None of us begins to understand the
consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the
knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political
calculation and modify every political premise. Under the
impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of
the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become
variables.

"It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original

dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the
management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the
human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves
to self-deception and to forms of persuasion that we cannot
verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely on intuition,
conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal
with the world beyond our reach."

And indeed, it would occur to no one to accuse high officialdom

today of acting on so vulgar and sentimental an impulse as
"conscience." That is left to those naïve purveyors of the
"original dogma of democracy" who unrealistically maintain that
"the human heart" – the President's transparently fake
protestations to the contrary – via the public, might even
theoretically play some role in the state's decision making.

The Phantom Public's Fall

Writing in The Phantom Public, we find an even deeper

contempt – which at times borders on outright loathing – of
ordinary citizens and their capacity to evaluate political
questions. By this time, some of the readers may aver that it has
been demonstrated time and again that the American public is
disinterested in public affairs and remarkably ignorant of such
basic facts as the name of the Vice President or the location of
any number of countries on a map.

To them I say that they too, looking down from their precarious
perch, are among the "bystanders" who must defer to the
superior judgment of the "leaders," just like all the assumed
"idiots" out there. There are many layers of self-deception. To
illustrate, a recent report indicated that a mere 0.1% of the
population contributed 84% of the monies, some billions of
dollars, to political campaigns in 2000. These 300,000 odd
Americans, along with the rest of their friends in the top 1%,
make for a pretty good approximation of the "responsible men."
Forward then.

"When power, however absolute and unaccountable, reigns

without provoking a crisis, public opinion does not challenge it.
Somebody must challenge arbitrary power first. The public can
only come to his assistance. That, I think, is the utmost that
public opinion can effectively do. With the substance of the
problem it can do nothing usually but meddle ignorantly or
tyrannically. It has no need to meddle with it. Men in their active
relation to affairs have to deal with the substance, but in that
indirect relationship when they can act only through uttering
praise or blame, making black crosses on white paper, they have
done enough, they have done all they can do if they help to make
it possible for the reason of other men to assert itself.

"For when public opinion attempts to govern directly it is either

a failure or a tyranny. It is not able to master the problem
intellectually, nor to deal with it except by wholesale impact.
The theory of democracy has not recognized this truth because it
has identified the functioning of government with the will of the
people. This is a fiction. The intricate business of framing laws
and of administering them through several hundred thousand
public officials is in no sense the act of the voters nor a
translation of their will."

It is notable that he does not see fit to cite a single historical

example of the public's "tyranny"; for him it is self-evident, a
truism. It is further curious that the unambiguous tyrannies
perpetrated by "leaders," unfettered by "meddlesome" public
opinion prior the dawn of democratic forms, also escape his
imperious sights. There certainly were enough of them in our
own history – slavery comes to mind, as do the depredations of
the pre-Wilson robber barons – to merit a mention, no?
Nonetheless…

"The modus vivendi of any particular historical period, the

system of rights and duties, has generally acquired some high
religious or ideal sanction. The thinkers laureate of the age will
generally manage to show that the institutions, the laws, the
morality and the custom of that age are divinely inspired. These
tiresome illusions have been exploded a thousand times. The
prevailing system of rights and duties at any time is at bottom a
slightly antiquated formulation of the balance of power among
the active interests in the community…

"But, whether the system is obsolete or not, in its naked origin, a

right is a claim somebody was able to assert, and a duty is an
obligation someone was able to impose." Here, Lippmann once
again speaks deep truth. "Natural rights" – a noble fiction.

Lippmann douses such shopworn homilies as "America,

America, God shed his grace on thee" and the like in yet another
acid bath. His final formulation is, however, a more significant
and actually helpful one. In an era in which our "rights" (the
chilling effect on the 1st Amendment, the full frontal assault on
the 4th Amendment) are in full retreat and new "duties" (in the
spirit of "Operation TIPS" and kindred totalitarianisms) are
surfacing, we should keep this trenchant maxim well in mind.

"The random collection of bystanders who constitute the public

could not, even if they had a mind to, intervene in all the
problems of the day… Normally they leave their proxies to a
kind of professional public consisting of more or less eminent
persons. Most issues are never carried beyond this ruling group;
the lay publics catch only echoes of the debate.

"If, by the push and pull of interested parties and public

personages, settlements are made more or less continually, the
party in power has the confidence of the country. In effect, the
outsiders are arrayed behind the dominant insiders. But if the
interested parties cannot be made to agree, if, as a result, there is
disturbance and chronic crisis, then the opposition among the
insiders may come to be considered the hope of the country, and
be able to entice the bystanders to its side.

"To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the
Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that
has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence
of popular government… A community where there is no choice
does not have popular government. It is subject to some form of
dictatorship or it is ruled by the intrigues of the politicians in the
lobbies.

"Although it is the custom of partisans to speak as if there were

radical differences between the Ins and Outs, it could be
demonstrated, I believe, that in stable and mature societies the
differences are necessarily not profound…

"In the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and in

certain of the Continental countries an election rarely means
even a fraction of what the campaigners said it would mean. It
means some new faces and perhaps a slightly different tendency
in the management of affairs. The Ins may have had a bias
toward collectivism; the Outs will lean toward individualism…

"There is, therefore, a certain mock seriousness about the

campaigning for votes in well-established communities. Much of
the excitement is not about the fate of the nation but simply
about the outcome of the game. Some of the excitement is
sincere, like any fervor of intoxication. And much of it is
deliberately stoked up by the expenditure of money to overcome
the inertia of the mass of the voters."

I have yet to see a more accurate, to say nothing of yawningly

matter-of-fact, dissection of the two-party collusion as it exists
today.

"It follows from this that a rule must be organized so that it can
be amended without revolution. Revision must be possible by
consent. But assent is not always given, even when the
arguments in favor of change are overwhelming. Men will stand
on what they call their rights. Therefore, in order that deadlock
should be dissoluble, a rule should provide that subject to a
certain formal procedure – the controversy over revision shall be
public. This will often break up the obstruction. Where it does
not, the community is pretty certain to become engaged on
behalf of one of the partisans. This is likely to be inconvenient to
all concerned, and the inconvenience due to meddling in the
substance of a controversy by a crude, violent and badly aimed
public opinion at least may teach those directly concerned not to
invoke interference the next time."

Now this segment is a real beaut. In essence, Lippmann

elucidates just when the public might become involved in
political decision-making – whenever the "dominant insiders"
are unable to reach a mutually satisfactory consensus. More
likely than bringing anything to the table, the public, by aligning
itself with one faction of the dominant insiders, will instead
probably provide an object lesson. Their "crudeness" and
"violence" will chasten the leaders to resolve their problems
internally the next time.

Having outlined his servile role for the public, Lippmann assigns
to political scientists the task of analyzing public opinion and
providing technocratic expertise.

"It is the task of the political scientist to devise the methods of

sampling and to define the criteria of judgment (for leaders). It is
the task of civic education (i.e. "social studies" and "history"
classes) in a democracy to train the public in the use of these
methods (i.e. cultivate being a chump). It is the task of those
who build institutions to take them into account."

In a passage that has seen some exposure, again by Chomsky –

without his tireless work, this essay could not exist – Lippmann
shows his true colors.

"A false ideal of democracy can only lead to disillusionment and

to meddlesome tyranny. If democracy cannot direct affairs, then
a philosophy which expects it to direct them will encourage the
people to attempt the impossible; they will fail, but that will
interfere outrageously with the productive liberties of the
individual. The public must be put in its place, so that it may
exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so
that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a
bewildered herd."

Technocracy Defeats Liberal Democracy

"They [classical liberals of the enlightenment] made, instead, a

noble appeal to their [the bystander's] highest instincts. They
spoke over the heads of men to man… [Classical Liberalism's]
appeal to everybody's conscience gave nobody a clue how to act;
the voter, the politician, the laborer, the capitalist had to
construct their own codes ad hoc, accompanied perhaps by an
expansive liberal sentiment, but without intellectual guidance
from liberal thought.

"In a time when liberalism had lost its accidental association

with free trade and laissez faire, through their abandonment in
practice, it sadly justified itself as a necessary and useful spirit,
as a kind of genial spook worth having around the place. For
when individual men, guided by no philosophy but their own
temporary rationalizations, got themselves embroiled, the spook
would appear and in a peroration straighten out the more
arbitrary biases displayed…

"It [liberalism] cannot say: You do this and you do that, as all
ruling philosophies must. It can only say: That isn't fair, that's
selfish, that's tyrannical. Liberalism has been, therefore, a
defender of the underdog, and his liberator, but not his guide,
when he is free. Top dog himself, he easily leaves his liberalism
aside, and to liberals the sour reflection that they have forged a
weapon of release but not a way of life.

"The liberals have misunderstood the nature of the public to

which they appealed... He assumed all mankind was within
hearing, that all mankind, when it heard, would respond
homogenously because it had a single soul. His appeal to this
cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested intuition in everybody was
equivalent to an appeal to nobody."

This is a bitter pill. It's not enough that the ideals of the
Enlightenment have not yet spread far and wide in the United
States, which necessitates more and better popular education.
No, it was all a waste of time to appeal to such illusions as
universality and conscience in the first place. The "top dog" has
no time for it, you see. That solves that problem.

In what anyone might consider a lay definition of "morality,"

who is really at fault here: the ordinary, disoriented citizen or the
well-informed insider who so cavalierly dismisses and
advertently manipulates and deceives his fellow Americans? The
question is a valid today as it was then.

"No such fallacy [as with enlightenment liberalism] is to be

found in the political philosophies which active men have lived
by. They have all assumed, as a matter of course, that in the
struggle against evil it was necessary to call upon some specific
agent to do the work…

"It was the peculiarity of liberalism among theories which have

played a great part in the world that it attempted to eliminate the
hero entirely… The great state builders of modern times,
Hamilton, Cavour, Bismark, Lenin, each had in mind somebody,
some group of real people, who were to realize his program. The
agents in the theory have varied, of course; they are the
landlords, then the peasants, or the unions, or the military class,
or the manufacturers; there are theories addressed to a church, to
the ruling classes in particular nations, to some nation or race."

It is a guffaw-inducing thing, at first glance, to read Alexander

Hamilton, Bismarck and Lenin quoted admiringly in the same
sentence. Another look reveals that by this logic, the Nazi Führer
Prinzip has merit insofar as it "calls upon a specific agent," a
"race," to "build a great state" while invoking the "hero." Not
like those liberal wimps.

It is true that the Enlightenment project sought to make of those

exposed to its charms independent in intellect and of rational
mind. This is what distinguishes, among other things,
participatory democracy from the mentality which informs elite-
orchestrated "bystander democracy," Fascism and Communism.
The people are fools, only we the "responsible men," the "master
race" or the "vanguard party" are fit to rule.

Propaganda, becoming evermore nuanced and pervasive in form

and content, has been a staple of American life for eight decades
now, manifested most frequently in advertising but also in very
explicit and highly coordinated governmental or corporate
campaigns and stunts over the years (among the more
memorable in recent history were the Gulf War Show complete
with lurid tales that explicitly recalled World War I propaganda
against Hun (German) atrocities, the "Harry and Louise" ads
against universal health care and the Al Gore victory in the
"debate" with Ross Perot over NAFTA – a pro-investor treaty
which every single newspaper of note endorsed).

All of them, however, have been dwarfed, and not only in terms
of the stakes, by the sheer enormity of lies and distortions that
have streamed out of the Bush administration since 9/11. The
likely ongoing development of something akin to the (allegedly
discarded) Pentagon "Office of Strategic Influence," an overt
and permanent domestic propaganda agency, is just the latest
indicator of the war on public opinion.

For the past two decades, on matters of rich and poor and
certainly since 9/11 on matters of war and peace, we the people
have been "put in our place," by the powers that are. The
"phantom public" does not rest perpetually however. Indeed, the
likes of Lippmann could never have foreseen the achievements
 New Deal or the anti-Vietnam War movement. [Lippmann
himself, interestingly, was a critic of Vietnam well before the
Tet Offensive.] With a disastrous war upon us and whispers of
economic crisis aloft, the phantom may yet rise to again haunt
the ghastly keepers of Lippmann's flame.

May 3, 2005

Stephen Bender [send him mail] is a writer based in San

Francisco. You can find more of his work at his website.

Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com

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The Phantom Public

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The Phantom Public is a book published in 1925 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. As Carl Bybee wrote, “For
Lippmann the public was a theoretical fiction and government was primarily an
administrative problem to be solved as efficiently as possible, so that people could get on
with their own individualistic pursuits” (48).

[edit] Context

The Phantom Public was published in 1925 following Lippmann's experiences observing
the manipulation of public opinion during World War I and the rise of fascism in
Mussolini's Italy. It followed his better-known work Public Opinion (1922) and moves
further toward disillusionment with democratic politics. The book provoked a response
from philosopher John Dewey, who argued in The Public and its Problems (1927) that
the public was not a phantom, but merely "in eclipse," and that a robust democratic
politics is possible. Today, this "debate" between Lippmann and Dewey continues to be
important for the critique of contemporary journalism, and press critics such as New
York University's Jay Rosen invoke it to support moves toward civic journalism.

[edit] Lippmann's Argument in The Phantom Public

Lippmann’s book is a forceful critique of the what he takes to be mistaken conceptions of

“the public” found in democratic theory: that the public is made up of sovereign and
omnicompetent citizens (21); that “the people” are a sort of superindividual with one will
and one mind (160), or an “organism with an organic unity of which the individual is a
cell” (147); that the public directs the course of events (77); that it is a knowable body
with fixed membership (110); that it embodies cosmopolitan, universal, disinterested
intuition (168-9); that is a dispenser of law or morals (106); and so forth. Lippmann
counters that the public is none of these things; rather, it is a “mere phantom,” an
abstraction (77) embedded in a “false philosophy” (200) that depends on a “mystical
notion of Society” (147). Democratic theories, he argues, vaguely assert that the public
can act competently to direct public affairs and that the functioning of government is the
will of the people, but Lippmann dismisses these notions of the capacities of the public as
a fiction.

Against these idealizations and obfuscations, Lippmann posits that society is made up of
two types of people: agents and bystanders (also referred to as insiders and outsiders).
The agent is someone who can act “executively” on the basis of his own opinions to
address the substance of an issue, and the bystander is the public—merely a spectator of
action. Only those familiar enough with the substance of a problem are able to the
analyze it and propose solutions, to take “executive action.” And yet no one is of
executive capacity at all times—this is the myth of the omnicompetent sovereign
democratic citizen. Instead, individuals move in and out of these capacities: “The actors
in one affair are the spectators of another, and men are continually passing back and forth
between the field where they are executives and the field where they are members of a
public. The distinction between agents and bystanders… is not an absolute one” (110).
Most of the time, however, the public is just a “deaf spectator in the back row” (13)
because for the most part individuals are more interested in their private affairs and their
individual relations than in those matters that govern society, the public questions about
which they know very little.

According to Lippmann, however, the public does have one specific role, one particular
capacity, which is to intervene during a moment of social disturbance or “a crisis of
maladjustment.” In such a crisis, “It is the function of public opinion to check the use of
force” (74) by using its own force. Public opinion responds to failures in the
administration of government by deciding—through voting—whether to throw one party
out in favor or another. The public, however, moves to such action not by its own volition
but by being led there by those insiders who can identify and assess the situation for
them. The public is incapable of deciding rationally about whether there is a crisis:
“Public opinion is a rational force … It does not reason, investigate, invent, persuade,
bargain or settle” (69). It can only exert force upon those who are capable of direct action
by making a judgment as to which group is better able to address the problem at hand:
“When men take a position in respect to the purposes of others they are acting as a
public” (198). This check on arbitrary force is the most that can be expected of the public.
It is the highly circumscribed but “special purpose” of public opinion.

Lippmann doesn’t apologize for his elitism. His theory of society is “a theory that puts its
trust chiefly in the individuals directly concerned [i.e., the insiders, not the “public”].
They initiate, they administer, they settle. It would subject them to the least possible
interference from ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” [i.e. the public] (198-9). Such a
conception of society “economizes the attention of men as members of the public, and
asks them to do as little as possible in matters where they can do nothing very well.”
Finally, it “confines the effort of men, when they are a public, to … an intervention that
may help to allay [social] disturbance, and thus allow them to return to their own affairs.
For it is the pursuit of their special affairs that they are most interested in" (198-9).

[edit] References

Bybee, Carl. "Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age?" Journalism and
Communication Monographs 1:1 (Spring 1999): 29-62

Lippmann, Walter. (1925). The Phantom Public

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Public"

Categories: 1925 books | Political science books

Walter Lippmann

September 23, 1889

Born
New York, New York
December 14, 1974 (aged 85)
Died
New York, New York
Nationality United States
Alma mater Harvard University A.B. (1909)
Occupation Writer, journalist, political commentator
Founding editor, New Republic
Known for
Pulitzer Prize, 1958 & 1962
Parents Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann

Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an influential
American award-winning writer, journalist, and political commentator. Lippman was the
recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and 1962 for his syndicated newspaper column,
"Today and Tomorrow."

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Early life
• 2 Journalism and democracy
• 3 Death
• 4 Bibliography
• 5 See also
• 6 Notes
• 7 References

• 8 External links

[edit] Early life

Lippmann was born on September 23, 1889 in New York City to German-Jewish parents,
Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. The family was upper-middle class, taking annual
family trips to Europe. 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 tried to reconcile the
tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920
book Liberty and the News.

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.
Lippmann had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had no sympathy for
communism. After Lippmann had become famous, 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.

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.

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 into 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 he then transmits 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.”

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."
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 (which
he coined in this specific meaning) 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.

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 (1925),
he recognized that the class of experts were also, in most respects, outsiders to particular
problem, and hence, not capable of effective action. 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, 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.

Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents.[citation needed] He had a rather

famous feud with Lyndon Johnson over his handling of the Vietnam War, of which
Lippman had become highly critical.[citation needed]

A meeting of intellectuals organized in Paris in August 1938 by French philosopher

Louis Rougier, Colloque Walter Lippmann was named after Walter Lippmann. Walter
Lippmann House at Harvard University, which houses the Nieman Foundation for
Journalism, is named after him too. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman used one of
Lippmann's catch phrases, the "Manufacture of Consent" for the title of their book, which
contains sections critical of Lippmann's views about the media: Manufacturing Consent.

[edit] Death

Lippman died on December 14, 1974 at age 85 in New York, New York.[1]

[edit] 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
o Public Opinion at Project Gutenberg
• The Phantom Public (1925) ISBN 1-56000-677-3
• Men of Destiny (1927) ISBN 0-29595-026-9
• A Preface to Morals (1929) ISBN 0-87855-907-8
• The Method of Freedom (1934) out-of-print
• 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

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