Public Opinion

"Lippmann is one of many early 20th-century philosophers and journalists (and Lippmann was both of course) who are trying to figure out the place of spin – or as it was called then, propaganda, publicity, public relations – in this new modern age, where we had mass democracy, mass media, a shrinking world. And by the 1920s, when Lippmann wrote this book, he had become disillusioned with certain aspects of classical democratic theory that assumed, somewhat naively, that citizens could just be fully rational and knowledgeable in making up their minds about public issues. He saw how often that had not been the case: in the case of the war, and the postwar failure to bring about the peace Wilson had hoped for. He saw how ill-informed people were. But he didn’t really blame people for being stupid or ignorant. He realized that it was impossible for any person in the modern world to know as much as he or she needed to know to weigh in intelligently on so many different issues that they had to weigh in on. And as public opinion became this governing force in our political life, and as the public became this mass public, this creates a real dilemma. And Lippmann’s solution, a watered-down version of which has sort of been adopted, was having an increasing reliance on experts to help arbitrate the situation. So that experts could sort out truth from spin, truth from falsehood, and present this to the public."

"I can’t tell you how deeply I love this book. Some people get excited by Sex and the City but I get excited by Public Opinion. I could read you chapters on end and say: ‘This is brilliant and true!’ It was written in 1922 and is an insider’s view of how news is made. That is, news is a made thing. News is not facts. News is what is easiest for a reporter to recognise, not necessarily most important for the public to know – a kidnapping, a bombing, a court filing, anything that pokes up from the irregular and massive tissue of reality and events. For example, you could say: ‘Today there is a British Airways strike.’ But underneath that is a morass of barely detectable instances and feelings, a cavalcade of greed and human longing and anger. News is good at recording the overt act everyone can see but it’s less equipped to determine the how and the why of the event. One example Lippman uses is the Russian Revolution. He was fascinated by what he saw in the newspapers and how there was no reporting of the Revolution’s successes, partly because of censorship, propaganda, and the difficulty of the Russian language, but ‘the hardest thing to report is chaos’. I find this so familiar from my own reporting."