Journalism and its discontents
Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero.
Editor's note: The following is the author's afterword for a reissue of Walter Lippman's "Liberty and the News," to be published this month by Princeton University Press.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Read more: Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Journalism, Newspapers, Press, Opinion
Oct. 25, 2007 | Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.
Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")
Among his varied roles, Lippmann was the original and most prescient analyst of the modern media. His disillusioning experience in World War I prompted the first of three books on the subject, "Liberty and the News," followed in rapid succession by "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public." In them Lippmann deconstructed the distortions and lies of government propaganda eagerly transmitted by a jingoist press corps, the "manufacture of consent" and the creation of "stereotypes" projected as false reality.
"Liberty and the News," first published in 1920, is being reissued by Princeton University Press, and its insights into the "error, illusion, and misinterpretation" in wartime of the "news-structure" remain as fresh as ever. For this volume, I have written an afterword, using Lippmann's ideas as a prism to illuminate the current crisis of the press and its professional collapse.
From the moment he entered onto the public scene as a writer for the new journal of opinion, The New Republic, established in 1914, Walter Lippmann's precocity was apparent. He made his way almost effortlessly into the highest levels of society and politics, his uninterrupted elevation almost proof in itself of the progressive view of history. Yet his thinking, particularly about the craft of journalism, derived chiefly from experience with the curdling of American Progressivism and the end of its innocence after World War I.
Lippmann sharpened his early disillusionment into a perfectly pitched tone of omniscience. He descended from his lofty peak as a wise man with an Olympian air of detachment, permitting mere mortals to benefit from his counsel. Oracle to the powers that be, he was also the father of modern objectivity. He never saw any contradiction between his deeds and words or felt any need to pause over any supposed conflict. Nor did any public figure suggest that there was anything untoward or unseemly in his alliances or aversions. Instead, they sought his approbation and cordiality. His immersion in politics while holding forth as a disinterested observer did not taint him as hypocritical or false. Everyone understood that he was Walter Lippmann. If there were a prevailing prejudice about him, it was a tendency to judge him by his cogency and influence.
The standards of objective journalism Lippmann painstakingly advocated in the early twentieth century, and which were adopted as ideal goals by major news organizations in midcentury, have long since been traduced, trampled, and trashed. The journalistic world before the Vietnam War was, to be sure, hardly a golden age. The pliability of much of the national press in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting smear campaigns occurred in the middle of those happy days. Golden ages glitter only in retrospect as viewed from the junkyard of the present. Nonetheless, there has been a steady degeneration of the press over the past few decades, involving both the willful self-destruction of hard-won credibility and the rationalization of dull incomprehension as invulnerable self-importance. The gap between Lippmann's ideals and present realities is one of the major reasons why Liberty and the News remains so pertinent -- and so troubling -- nearly ninety years after its publication.
"For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism," Lippmann wrote. That sentence was distilled from years of hope turned to despair. Lippmann had ferried from the offices of The New Republic, located in New York, to the White House, where he helped work on speeches for Woodrow Wilson. After the entry of the United States in the world war in 1917, Lippmann enthusiastically accepted an appointment as the U.S. representative on the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board, with the rank of captain. But Captain Lippmann soon crossed swords with George Creel, chief of the Committee on Public Information, an official federal government agency that whipped up war support through jingoism. When Lippmann submitted a blistering report in 1918 on how the committee manipulated news to foster national hysteria, Creel sought his dismissal -- and Lippmann quit his post to assist the U.S. delegation at the Versailles peace conference. The year following the war, 1919, began with Wilson greeted as a messiah and ended with him politically broken and physically paralyzed. His collapse personified the wreckage of Progressive idealism. Lippmann focused his attention on the part played by the press.
"Everywhere today," Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News, "men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise."
Lippmann had witnessed firsthand how the "manufacture of consent" had deranged democracy. But he did not hold those in government solely responsible. He also described how the press corps was carried away on the wave of patriotism and became self-censors, enforcers, and sheer propagandists. Their careerism, cynicism, and error made them destroyers of "liberty of opinion" and agents of intolerance, who subverted the American constitutional system of self-government. Even the great newspaper owners, he wrote, "believe that edification is more important than veracity. They believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other considerations must yield. That is their pride. And yet what is this but one more among myriad examples of the doctrine that the end justifies the means? A more insidiously misleading rule of conduct was, I believe, never devised among men."
Public opinion was not a free marketplace of ideas, but was channeled and polluted by the managers of news. They concentrated their power at the expense of accurately informing the public, whose fears and hatreds they exploited. Reason was impossible to sustain in the whirlwind. Lippmann wrote:
Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news. The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair "to the best foundations for their information," then anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each man's hope and each man's whim becomes the basis of government. All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts. No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.
Next page: The press as a corrupt special interest
