Writer and editor, born in New York City, New York, USA. He was perhaps the most influential political commentator of his time, sought after by world leaders and followed by millions of loyal readers. After graduating from Harvard (1910), where he studied philosophy, political science, and economics, and was influenced by George Santayana, Lippmann assisted Lincoln Steffens in muckraking research and briefly served as aide to a Socialist mayor. His first book, A Preface to Politics (1913), led Herbert Croley to recruit him (1914) as an editor for the influential New Republic. During World War 1, he collaborated in research for a post-war peace conference, in which he later participated. In 1921 he joined the New York World, becoming editorial page editor (19239) and editor (192931). Meanwhile, in Public Opinion (1922), he analysed opinion formation and questioned the public's ability to evaluate complex issues, and in A Preface to Morals (1929) he stressed the importance of disinterestedness. He joined the New York Tribune (1931), and his column Today and Tomorrow became widely syndicated and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Later he wrote a column for Newsweek. Never doctrinaire, he promoted a pragmatic liberalism in The Good Society (1937) and criticized the New Deal for collectivist tendencies. Late in life he backed President Lyndon Johnson's domestic programmes but split with him over the Vietnam War.
Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974) was an influential United States writer, journalist, and political commentator.
Early life
Lippmann was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann.
At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas.
Journalism and Democracy
Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and a philosopher who argued that true democracy is a goal that can't 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 advisor 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. 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 MGB (USSR). 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 neither unbiased nor accurate. 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. 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."
Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as "intelligence work."
Though a journalist himself, he held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. 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. Democratic ideals had deteriorated, voters were uninstructed as to issues and policies, they lacked the competence to participate in public life and were disinterested in 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.
The basic problem of democracy, he wrote, was the accuracy of news and protection of sources. 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."
Lippmann said the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." Modern critics of journalism and democracy say that history has borne out Lippmann's model.
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.
Following the removal from office of Henry A.
See also: Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays
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