Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion.
Lippmann also played a notable role as research director of Woodrow Wilson's post–World War I board of inquiry. His views on the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann–Dewey Debate. Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khrushchev.
He has also been highly praised with titles ranging from "most influential" journalist of the 20th century to "Father of Modern Journalism". Michael Schudson writes that James W. Carey considered Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion as "the founding book of modern journalism" and also "the founding book in American media studies".
Early life and education
Lippmann was born on New York's Upper East Side as the only child of Jewish parents of German origin. According to his biographer Ronald Steel, he grew up in a "gilded Jewish ghetto". His father, Jacob Lippmann, was a rentier who had become wealthy through his father's textile business and his father-in-law's real estate speculation. His mother, Daisy Baum, cultivated contacts in the highest circles, and the family regularly spent its summer holidays in Europe. The family had a Reform Jewish orientation; averse to "orientalism", they attended Temple Emanu-El. Walter had his Reform Jewish confirmation instead of the traditional Bar Mitzvah at the age of 14. Lippmann was emotionally distanced from both parents, but had closer ties to his maternal grandmother. His family was Republican.From 1896 Lippmann attended the Sachs School for Boys, followed by the Sachs Collegiate Institute, an elite and strictly secular private school in the German Gymnasium tradition, attended primarily by children of German-Jewish families and run by the classical philologist Julius Sachs, a son-in-law of Marcus Goldmann from the Goldman-Sachs family. Classes included 11 hours of ancient Greek and 5 hours of Latin per week.
Shortly before his 17th birthday, he entered Harvard University where he wrote for The Harvard Advocate and studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating upon philosophy and languages. While at Harvard, he tried out for The Harvard Crimson but was rejected. He took only one course in history and one in government. He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society, though important social clubs rejected Jews as members.
Lippmann became a member, alongside Sinclair Lewis, of the New York chapter of the Socialist Party of America. In 1911, Lippmann served as secretary to George R. Lunn, the first Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, during Lunn's first term. Lippmann resigned his post after four months, finding Lunn's programs to be worthwhile in and of themselves, but inadequate as socialism.
Career
Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and an amateur 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.During World War I, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in the Army on June 28, 1918, and was assigned to the intelligence section of the AEF headquarters in France. He was assigned to the staff of Edward M. House in October and attached to the American Commission to negotiate peace in December. He returned to the United States in February 1919 and was immediately discharged.
Through his connection to House, Lippmann became an adviser to Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points speech. He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information. While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had "no doctrinaire belief in free speech," he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression."
Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He 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 newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow", he wrote several books.
Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "Cold War" to a common currency, in his 1947 book by the same name.
Political thought
Lippmann saw nationalist separatism, imperialist competition, and failed states as key causes of war. He envisioned the eventual decline of the nation-state and its replacement with large inclusive and democratic political units.As solution to the problem of failed states, he proposed the creation of regional authorities to provide political control, as well as education of public opinion to build support for these regional governments. He called for the creation of international organizations for each crisis region in the world: "there should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those spots of the earth where world crises originate."
He saw the creation of the United States in 1789 as a model for a proposed World State or supranational government, as it was possible to create a constitution to bring order to an otherwise anarchic area. Commerce and regular interactions between people from different nations would alleviate the adverse aspects of nationalism.
Later life
After the fall of the British colony Singapore in February 1942, Lippmann authored an influential Washington Post column that criticized empire and called on western nations to "identify their cause with the freedom and security of the peoples of the East" and purge themselves of "white man's imperialism".Following the removal from office of Secretary of Commerce 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 George F. Kennan.
Lippmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1947 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949.
Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents. On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson presented Lippmann with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He later feuded with Johnson over his handling of the Vietnam War of which Lippmann had become highly critical.
He won a special Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1958, as a nationally syndicated columnist, citing "the wisdom, perception and high sense of responsibility with which he has commented for many years on national and international affairs." In 1961, Lippmann won a Peabody Award for an interview on CBS Reports. In 1962, he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting citing "his 1961 interview with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, as illustrative of Lippmann's long and distinguished contribution to American journalism."
Lippmann retired from his syndicated column in 1967.
Lippmann died in New York City due to cardiac arrest in 1974.
Journalism
Though a journalist himself, Lippmann did not assume that news and truth are synonymous. For Lippmann, 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 they construct their reality. The news, therefore, is "imperfectly recorded" and too fragile to bear the charge as "an organ of direct democracy."To Lippmann, democratic ideals had deteriorated: voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies and lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for participating in the political process. In Public Opinion, Lippmann noted that modern realities threatened the stability that the government had achieved during the patronage era of the 19th century. He wrote that a "governing class" must rise to face the new challenges.
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 interpretation as stereotypes 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.
John Dewey in his book The Public and Its Problems, published in 1927, agreed about the irrationality of public opinion, but he rejected Lippmann's call for a technocratic elite. Dewey believed that in a democracy, the public is also part of the public discourse. The Lippmann-Dewey Debate started to be widely discussed by the late 1980s in American communication studies circles. Lippmann also figured prominently in the work Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky who cited Lippmann's advocacy of "manufacture of consent" which referred "to the management of public opinion, which felt was necessary for democracy to flourish, since he felt that public opinion was an irrational force."