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Public Opinion

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In what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. As Michael Curtis indicates in his introduction to this edition. Public Opinion qualifies as a classic by virtue of its systematic brilliance and literary grace. The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of "the world outside and the pictures in our heads, " a leitmotif that starts with issues of censorship and privacy, speed, words, and clarity, and ends with a careful survey of the modern newspaper. The work is a showcase for Lippmann's vast erudition. He easily integrated the historical, psychological, and philosophical literature of his day, and in every instance showed how relevant intellectual formations were to the ordinary operations of everyday life. Public Opinion is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

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About the author

Walter Lippmann

94 books142 followers
Walter Lippmann was an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator who gained notoriety for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War. Lippmann was twice awarded (1958 and 1962) a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, "Today and Tomorrow."

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
Profile Image for Trevor.
1,332 reviews22.6k followers
September 1, 2014
I read this book after reading Brian's review here http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...


Where this book is really quite interesting is in the fact that it is a kind of modernisation of Plato’s Republic. I’m not just saying that because it starts by quoting the allegory of the cave, but because all of the central ideas of the book seem to me to be essentially Platonic. For example, democracy is presented as a really good idea ‘in theory’, but one that is incapable of working in practice. This is put forward for much the same reason’s Plato used in criticising democracy: that it is too easy to be perverted by flatterers, that 'the people' are too blinded by their day-to-day needs to understand the great sweep of history, and that the masses are lead more by their loins and stomachs than by their reason.

But this book also updates Plato by reference to what was at the time the latest in psychological research which shows that mere humans don’t cope very well with complexity. The problem is that the world is an incredibly complex place. People understand their own needs quite well, but, and this is where the book is much more intelligent than say, works by Hayek or Friedman, an understanding of these immediate needs simply isn’t enough to understand the complexities of life in society. Where Hayek and Friedman resolve this complication by essentially denying society (see Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘there is no such thing as society, there are individuals and there are families’) – Lippmann does quite the opposite. He says that because there is such a thing as society and since the path necessary to forge society onward is too complex to be understood by the great mass of humanity, there is a need for ‘experts’ to mould the minds of people in society so that they choose the right path. His definition of an expert as someone disinterested and a kind of boffin is also amusing.

Given people are confronted by complexity all of the time the solution they have for dealing with this complexity is essentially to resort to stereotypes. And he doesn’t limit this just to the great unwashed – everyone is guilty of these simplifications. The problem is we couldn't function without such simplifications – but obviously enough, our simplified view always leaves us in danger of choosing the wrong path – and, again, this is why those disinterested souls (what Plato referred to as Philosopher Kings) need to intervene to ensure that government of the people and for the people doesn’t end up government by the people. The people are never disinterested enough to make good rulers. And when they vote for something they don't vote for a single reason - but for a complexity of reasons, with people voting for the same candidate often for quite opposite reasons. This part of the book was particularly interesting.

Many of the same arguments put today about why we can’t really have a free press where also standard then, it seems - and I hadn't really expected this. For example, you might be excused for believing that it was the internet that brought about the argument that because we aren’t prepared to pay for our news, that we need to expect that those who will pay for our news, advertisers, will filter what we read through their perspective and in their interests. But it is argued here that the little amount we are prepared to pay for newspapers, even back then, also meant that the news was effectively free and therefore advertising has always played this role.

The best of this was his discussion of why strike action is generally portrayed badly in the press. To Lippmann it is simply a matter of self-interest. Not just the self interest of the ruling class – you know, the owners of the factories being more or less the same group as the owners of the papers and so the papers generally taking their side as a matter of course. But rather it is also the self-interest of the readers. The readers, on average, are unlikely to be directly involved in the strike – but, if the strike is effective, they are likely to be affected by the strike. Perhaps the striking factory makes something they need to buy. Perhaps it will stop them being able to work themselves through the lack of supply of something they use in their work – such being the interconnections of life in society. So, the fact strike action is likely to have a negative impact on the reader – much more likely that than it is to have a positive impact on them – it is fairly safe for newspapers to not be on the side of the strikers. Also, the reasons why people go on strike generally either sound selfish or are too complicated to make into a simple story to tell. Anyway, people think in stereotypes and one of the stereotypes is that strikes are always bad. Now, I still hold to the naïve view that newspapers advance the class interests of their owners and that is part of the reason why strikes are generally portrayed as bad – but I did find this alternative view interesting too.

There is, and always will be, something chilling in the Platonic vision of the master race finding useful lies to tell to the great mass of ill-informed humanity so as to distract and direct them towards the best of all possible worlds. But at least there is an honesty to this book that is quite missing from so much else today. That people like Murdoch act out these views today is not in the least hidden by the fact they say nearly the exact opposite of what they do in practice. Give me the chilling truth over the pacifying lie any day.

A lot of this book is quite dated now - I'm not sure how interesting the discussion on guild socialism is, to be honest, and many of the discussions on WW1 were overly long for me and too specific for me to really see their worth in supporting the argument of the book - but I think you could nearly get away with reading the first and last chapters of this to get enough of an overview to be going on with.
Profile Image for Brian Eshleman.
847 reviews112 followers
June 5, 2019
Want to understand the last hundred years, and maybe the next hundred, in terms of the interplay between mass media and people's assumptions? The short book is an awfully good start.
Profile Image for Robert.
116 reviews42 followers
November 7, 2013
This book is unfairly maligned because Chomsky holds it out as an example of elite liberal ideology (and it is a fair example in that regard), but Lippmann has a point about "public opinion". He wasn't the first or last to point out that the spontaneous majorities on various subjects are not necessarily rational or advantageous, and that they usually *aren't* when the public bases opinions off of sketchy information (and that this is a common phenomenon). Further, his argument that news and the truth are distinct should be uncontroversial in 2013. His point that they *can not* be the same thing, because truth *can not* be delivered in easily digestible pieces, should also ring true to most critical minds witnessing the so-called "Information Age" play out.

What makes Lippmann so unpopular is his "solution" to the problems of human ignorance and irrationality in a democracy: experts. Experts help wrap up a real problem that Lippmann describes quite vividly, but Lippmann does not seem to accept that those who make decisions (who in his mind must be distinct from experts---and in fact he sees an institutionalization of independent intelligence gatherers protected from legislators and the executive) are still subject to the bulk of the problems he describes. A President is not an expert, zhe must rely on experts to form a judgment and make a decision, and so ultimately a President must be an "expert of experts". All the problems about dealing with an unseen environment remain, only they are pushed farther down the line a bit.
Profile Image for Alex.
161 reviews16 followers
August 27, 2018
Nobody on Earth is omniscient and to make sense of the sea of info that surrounds us all all we make use of what Lippmann calls 'stereotypes,' preconceptions of ideas that help us fill in the gaps between the points of information we're exposed to. People carry different stereotypes with them and the same people can look at the exact same evidence and come to different conclusions, not to say that there aren't cases where the shared stereotypes of society can lead to near unanimous agreement.

I get this point of view and I agree with it, although I began to anticipate Lippmann's embrace of relativism that never actually happens. There's never any outright declaration that because people can have differing interpretations of the facts we ought to embrace nihilism, relativism, pyrrhonism, or even pragmatism, though William James is cited a lot, because of course, his work in psychology. Given what he writes about, Lippmann seems to believe that there is an objective world out there, the information of which can be easily manipulated and affect the course of politics, which he seems to be rather concerned about. 

He dismisses the idea of a coherent public opinion. Society cannot be viewed as any sort of being, and to personify it is misleading. Instead of you have a mass of individual opinions, vastly differing, easily manipulated and some of them manage to filter up through the mechanisms of democracy and affect public policy. A lot of decisions however involve factors that can disregard what the public believes, especially in an emergency. It's a very cynical view of democracy and and honest one. I disagree with Rousseau on so much but one of the things I believe he got right is that democracy only works in small countries, I believe for this very reason. Public opinion is less of an incoherent mess in such examples, and people are at least closer to the very small number of leaders actually involved in decisions.

The theme of stereotypes and the very limited points of contact we actually have with our world of information continues with more historical and political examples. Sometimes I felt like I was reading a book about World War One: The French government figures out the best way to continue lying to the public, the U.S. mobilizes it's propaganda apparatus after joining the war, US senators debate on military action after a garbled report about Americans troops in Italy reaches congress. He also writes about the press and how in a world of near infinite events, a few of them manage to find themselves into our publications as 'news'. 

The book ends with a remedy for the ills that Lippman identifies and it's a very straightforward and unsurprising call for critical thinking. [The teacher can instruct his students] for example, to look in his newspaper for the place where the dispatch was filed, for the name of the correspondent, the name of the press service, the authority given for the statement, the circumstances under which the statement was secured...to ask himself whether the reporter saw what he describes, and to remember how that reporter described other events in the past. He can teach him the character of censorship, of the idea of privacy, and furnish him with knowledge of past propaganda. He can... make him aware of the stereotype, and can educate a habit of introspection about the imagery evoked by printed words. He can... produce a life-long realization of the way codes impose a special pattern upon the imagination. He can teach men to catch themselves making allegories, dramatizing relations, and personifying abstractions. He can show the pupil how he identifies himself with these allegories, how he becomes interested, and how he selects the attitude, heroic, romantic, economic which he adopts while holding a particular opinion.

The rating might seem a little low. I really liked the psychology aspects of the book, but many of the politics sections seemed to take a life of their own. They weren't necessarily boring. I like reading about politics, but I felt they wandered to far from the point, and even could've fit into their own book. 

Profile Image for Jasmine.
668 reviews52 followers
October 9, 2008
I really liked this book. Although it was written more than 80 years ago I think that it addresses a very current issue.

This book begins with a discussion of social psychology. It explains how people see through different paradigms.

Then he builds from this a political theory. He denies "democracy" and discusses the federalist government, but I found that these designations are not as understandable in the modern vernacular. You have to pay close attention to system in which he is defining these terms.

The theory assumes a lack of capacity in people that is kind of upsetting, but it is easily understandable in the context of the civil and first world war that the school of realist democracy was reacting to.

Lippmann suggests a solution based in the use of insular experts helping to inform and direct government. He believes that these experts should enlighten the public, but he says that the public can only be involved in a direct democracy in small agrarian societies such as those Thomas Jefferson promoted.

There is also an interesting discussion of history in a more "present tense". He sites H.G. Wells history of the world which is a book that has fallen greatly out of use since a lot of science has changed since it was written. He also talks a lot about the founding fathers and fights in policy between Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington and Madison. These are contexts that tend to get blurred in more modern overviews of history, but are obviously very clear and important for Lippmann.

Profile Image for Ben Peters.
20 reviews12 followers
March 10, 2011
Whatever else one may think of this classic, it is written to take one's breath away. The images of Lippmann's prose alone--e.g. the Platonic, iconic "pictures in the mind," itself an almost mandatory talking point for those who pass through liberal arts education in America--guarantee that this book will repay reading and rereading. As for those who dismiss or belittle Lippmann as an elitist ready to cede political power to the expertise of the few, I am not convinced. Yes, he wrote in favor of those who might, as Chomsky later caught him, willfully "manufacture consent." Surely, not a happy image in an era sandwiched between the propaganda of two world wars. But still, I am not convinced that Lippmann's views are--or ever were--principally incompatible with a healthy public and a democratic state. It appears, recent historians have shown, that most of the legendary debate posited between Lippmann and John Dewey was fabricated well after the 1920s and 1930s. (Most of it, for understandable reasons, by the ever-incandescent James W. Carey in the 1980s.) Considering the spread of volunteer communities that leverage their own self-policed, peer-reviewed expertise for the benefit of the many in scalable, collaborative ways, online and off, it seems that this work finds fresh relevance in a digital era. It's no longer Dewey's democracy versus Lippmann's experts; it's time for Deweyan democrats to reacquaint themselves with Lippmann, and Public Opinion makes a great meeting point.
Profile Image for Ginny.
88 reviews15 followers
April 5, 2021
Too many examples, anecdotes and questions, and not enough answers and explanation.

While reading the book, I was often clueless on what the main point of the chapter/paragraph was.
Profile Image for Emma Gran.
2 reviews1 follower
February 2, 2021
One of the most thought-provoking reads of my entire life. Deeply insightful and full of stunning truths. Brilliant explanation of the struggles defined by democratic nations and very relevant to current political affairs.
December 3, 2021
Public opinion was published in 1997 and written by Walter Lappmann. It discusses the nature of human information and communication, the last section is about the news, earlier he talks about censorship and privacy along with a section Titled The Enlisting of Interest which I found to be very interesting and the best part of the book. There is also a discussion of symbolism and what it means of which I also found interesting. If there is one criticism of the book is that the last section is a bit uninteresting and dry compared to the entirety of the book which was ultimately hard to put down.

If you are interested in journalism and art this is a must read.
Profile Image for Kerry.
1,502 reviews66 followers
July 14, 2014
So overwrought with examples and anecdotes very little concrete information bleeds through. Man, what a blowhard.
Profile Image for Clif.
454 reviews135 followers
October 7, 2022
Walter Lippman calls democracy as thought of in America a myth. In this careful examination of the subject he provides factual evidence for his thinking that I believe is irrefutable.

The democracy that we believe ours to be would only be possible in a small community where everyone is directly and daily in contact with the local environment and the problems that must be dealt with, therefor having the necessary knowledge of all that needs to be known to decide the proper course of action.

Each member of the small community would be, certainly could be, omni-competent, able to think reasonably about the world they know thereby able to have an informed opinion to put to use deciding public issues in group assembly.

In a democracy that rules over a continental area and contains a third of a billion people, none of what I just described is possible. No citizen can take in all of the facts, all of the situations and technicalities that must be considered in order to build an informed opinion on an issue of national or even statewide importance. We all know about information overload and can avoid it only by ignoring a large majority of what goes on each day. The "news" is almost entirely a headline service that in itself cannot help but ignore a multitude of events even in a large city.

Lippman goes into detail about how we form stereotypes, necessary in order to avoid paralysis in our thinking. We form opinions based on these stereotypes, not on the particulars of a situation the details of which we cannot know. We only have so many hours in a day and we have a variety of interests among which staying informed in order to vote intelligently could easily take every waking minute and demand more.

We carry around our stereotypes and have prejudices for each one driven by our emotions, not reason. Our egos are defensive and resist challenges to stereotype. If we see something that confirms a stereotype we are quick to feel satisfaction in the confirmation because, yes, we are right, while contradictory evidence is easily ignored leaving the stereotype intact. While it is possible to escape this easy auto-pilot thinking, it takes effort to remain open minded and and in the majority of cases we must admit to ourselves that we simply don't know enough or anything about this or that. This admission of ignorance is truthful and courageous, but it is not comforting because it admits we cannot control our world.

Lippman, a journalist, demonstrates how impossible it is for the newspapers to inform public opinion rather than pander to it. The press wants to interest the reader, to avoid boring him and most certainly not to lose him. Stories conform to stereotypes, do not go into depth, do not offend advertisers or important people who may be sources of news.

This is a bleak picture and reading this book of unvarnished truth makes one realize why the public is uninformed and interested in entertainment and sports over public affairs, local or national. Lippman's suggestion is that those who know the subject research (without lobby influence) problems and come up with alternatives to address them by government action. Then leadership, which is carefully separated from and has no influence over the researchers, makes a decision to act from the choices the researchers have provided. The public at the voting booth decides only if the leaders have done well enough to deserve return to office.

Rejecting the old idea that the voice of people is the voice of god and recognizing the fact that the public is ill informed, ridden by stereotypical thinking, unqualified to judge issues on the facts of the case and prone to emotional voting over personal characteristics of candidates rather than the issues, Lippman hopes to have the democracy we have function in accord with reality rather than myth.

Though this book was written 100 years ago, I conclude with a paragraph from the book, as I ask if you don't find a resonance with American life today...

"The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to keep awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. As a private person he does not know for certain what is going on, or who is doing it, or where he is being carried. No newspaper reports his environment so that he can grasp it; no school has taught him how to imagine it; his ideals, often, do not fit it; listening to speeches, uttering opinions and voting do not, he finds, enable him to govern it. He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct."



Profile Image for Michelle.
1 review
February 17, 2021
While Lippmann’s final solution is questionable (even his greatest fans agree) this book is still of the most incisive critiques of democracy to date. With an insight into human psychology reminiscent of James, Lippmann spends the majority of the text laying out various hurdles that democracies face, both in relation to the media but also as a result of the human condition. Lippmann’s solution (only covered in the final chapter of the book) leaves much to be desired, but his diagnosis is on point. Neither Lippmann nor Dewey, who famously grappled with these problems and came to differing conclusions, has satisfactorily addressed the issues raised in Public Opinion. But they are issues we still struggle with today. Any thinker that is committed to the project of making democracy work must address these fundamental issues. To that end, I think that anyone interested in democracy, sociology, American politics, and how we interact with the media should read this book.
Profile Image for The Atlantic.
338 reviews1,641 followers
Read
November 4, 2022
"'Public Opinion,' at 100, has never been more relevant. Lippmann’s study of the human mind and the body politic, produced in the aftermath of World War I, analyzes the impact of a new mass-media system—on government, on news, on 'the pictures in our heads.' It applies the lessons of psychology, then a nascent field, to electoral politics. It warns of how easily propaganda, that evasive weapon of war, can become banal ... 'Public Opinion' saturates political discourse so completely that its insights, today, might seem obvious. In truth, they are ominous. Democracy is the work of minds made manifest; how will it proceed when 'the pictures in our heads' are blurred by lies?" — Megan Garber

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...
Profile Image for Lucas.
150 reviews30 followers
January 21, 2020
O primeiro capítulo desse livro ("The image in our heads") é simplesmente fantástico. Quando li pensei "Cara, esse vai ser um dos melhores livros que li na vida", mas a qualidade e os insights caíram muito para mim depois disso e por fim desisti de terminar. Certamente vale a leitura, Lippman foi um grande intelectual e quando leio ele tenho a sensação de estar lendo Richard Hofstadter, com um pouco menos brilho. No entanto, para além do capítulo 1, o livro não trouxe discussões que estou interessado nesse momento.
June 26, 2017
Για την εποχή που γράφτηκε θα πρέπει να ήταν πολύ προοδευτικό.
Ωστόσο για σήμερα & για όσα ανεφέρει, είναι σχετικά ξεπερασμένο.
Έχει ωραία κειμενάκια όμως για μαθητές Λυκείου που θέλουν να τα πάνε καλύτερα στο μάθημα της Έκθεσης..
Profile Image for Ashton.
27 reviews
March 5, 2024
Read this for a class... Really hope I pass this exam.
Profile Image for Jared.
306 reviews17 followers
September 27, 2019

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
- [Published in 1922]...is a critical assessment of functional democratic government, especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion.

WHO IS THE AUTHOR?
- Walter Lippmann was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator famous for being among the first to introduce the term ‘’stereotype’ in the modern psychological meaning.

PLATO’S ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE (THIS IS A KEY CONCEPT IN THE BOOK)
- Short, animated explanation: https://youtu.be/1RWOpQXTltA

- whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.

IMAGES OF THINGS BEYOND OUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
- The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts.

PICTURES, RESPONSES, AND ACTION
- ...the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action.

ARE WE SEEING THE SAME THING?!
- More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.

SINCE WE HAVE DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES, WE ACT DIFFERENTLY
- To expect that all men for all time will go on thinking different things, and yet doing the same things, is a doubtful speculation.

WHAT IS PROPAGANDA?
- But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?

TRENCH WARFARE DID NOT FIT INTO THE MENTAL PICTURE OF CITIZENS, SO THE IMAGE OF WHAT WAS CONSIDERED SUCCESSFUL WAS CHANGED
- By putting the dead Germans in the focus of the picture, and by omitting to mention the French dead, a very special view of the battle was built up. It was a view designed to neutralize the effects of German territorial advances and the impression of power which the persistence of the offensive was making.

- For the public, accustomed to the idea that war consists of great strategic movements, flank attacks, encirclements, and dramatic surrenders, had gradually to forget that picture in favor of the terrible idea that by matching lives the war would be won...the General Staff substituted a view of the facts that comported with this strategy.

PROPAGANDA WORKS WHEN YOU CONTROL THE NARRATIVE
- Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable.

“MO MONEY, MO PERSPECTIVE”
- The size of a man's income has considerable effect on his access to the world beyond his neighborhood.

STEREOTYPES
- For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

- Thus out of forty trained observers writing a responsible account of a scene that had just happened before their eyes, more than a majority saw a scene that had not taken place...They saw their stereotype of such a brawl.

STEREOTYPES COME FROM THE IMAGES WE HAVE IN OUR HEADS
- In untrained observation we pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images.

- Instead we notice a trait which marks a well known type, and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads.

STEREOTYPES ARE POWERFUL
- The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them.

REINFORCING WHAT WE ALREADY THOUGHT WE SAW
- If what we are looking at corresponds successfully with what we anticipated, the stereotype is reinforced for the future,

- For when a system of stereotypes is well fixed, our attention is called to those facts which support it, and diverted from those which contradict.

STEREOTYPES SAVE TIME AND MAKE THE WORLD LESS BEWILDERING
- the stereotype not only saves time in a busy life and is a defense of our position in society, but tends to preserve us from all the bewildering effect of trying to see the world steadily and see it whole.

WHAT IS PUBLIC OPINION
- ...a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts.

STEREOTYPES AND STRATEGISTS
- One generation of strategists, and perhaps two, had lived with that visual image as the starting point of all their calculations. For nearly four years every battle-map they saw had deepened the impression that this was the war. When affairs took a new turn, it was not easy to see them as they were then.

TIME IS A RELATIVE CONCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO PERCEPTIONS
- To the average Englishman, for example, the behavior of Cromwell, the corruption of the Act of Union, the Famine of 1847 are wrongs suffered by people long dead and done by actors long dead with whom no living person, Irish or English, has any real connection. But in the mind of a patriotic Irishman these same events are almost contemporary.

WE TEND TO HAVE AN ALL OR NOTHING VIEW
- In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently.

- Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all evil, and of another which is the system of all good.

- It is not enough to say that our side is more right than the enemy's, that our victory will help democracy more than his. One must insist that our victory will end war forever...Between omnipotence and impotence the pendulum swings.

STEREOTYPES OF GROUPS OF THINGS
- The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things.

REGAINING CONTROL OF YOUR SELF AFTER WAR
- It takes a long time to subdue so powerful an impulse once it goes loose. And therefore, when the war is over in fact, it takes time and struggle to regain self-control, and to deal with the problems of peace in civilian character.

REASON FOR FACTIONS AMONG PEOPLE MOST GENERALLY DUE TO DIFFERENCES IN DISTRIBUTION OF PROPERTY
- But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property." Madison's theory, therefore, is that the propensity to faction may be kindled by religious or political opinions, by leaders, but most commonly by the distribution of property.

- He does not say that their property and their opinions are cause and effect, but that differences of property are the causes of differences of opinion.

- That remedy assumes that if all property could be held in common, class differences would disappear. The assumption is false.

MASTER SYMBOLS (PICTURES PEOPLE HAVE IN THEIR HEADS) TO MASTER THE SITUATION
- If, for example, one man dislikes the League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis of what they all hate.

- A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation.

DO YOU WANT TO HAVE A WIDE APPEAL OR AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO A GROUP (HARD TO GET BOTH)?
- As you ascend the hierarchy in order to include more and more factions you may for a time preserve the emotional connection though you lose the intellectual...you see far and wide, but you see very little.

- As the public appeal becomes more and more all things to all men, as the emotion is stirred while the meaning is dispersed, their very private meanings are given a universal application.

MESSAGE HAS TO BE SHARED BY THE RIGHT PERSON
- The words themselves do not crystallize random feeling. The words must be spoken by people who are strategically placed, and they must be spoken at the opportune moment. Otherwise they are mere wind.

- symbols are made congenial and important because they are introduced to us by congenial and important people.

INNER CIRCLE
- There is an inner circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file.

- But the essential fact remains that a small number of heads present a choice to a large group.

UPHEAVAL FOLLOWS THE FALL OF A SYMBOL
- The disintegration of a symbol, like Holy Russia, or the Iron Diaz, is always the beginning of a long upheaval.

- For the spectacle of a row on Olympus is diverting and destructive.

HMMM...THIS SEEMS FAMILIAR
- They do not like direct taxation. They do not like to pay as they go. They like long term debts. They like to have the voters believe that the foreigner will pay.

- Labor leaders have always preferred an increase of money wages to a decrease in prices. There has always been more popular interest in the profits of millionaires, which are visible but comparatively unimportant,

- But that belief will not make the roads prosperous, if the impact of those rates on farmers and shippers is such as to produce a commodity price beyond what the consumer can pay.

- Trusted men in a familiar role subscribing to the accepted symbols can go a very long way on their own initiative without explaining the substance of their programs.

LIVING IN AN ECHO CHAMBER
- These chosen people in their self-contained environment had all the facts before them. The environment was so familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking about substantially the same things. The only real disagreements, therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts. There was no need to guarantee the sources of information. They were obvious, and equally accessible to all men.

- In the self-contained community one could assume, or at least did assume, a homogeneous code of morals. The only place, therefore, for differences of opinion was in the logical application of accepted standards to accepted facts.

SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES A CHECK ON PUBLIC OPINION
- "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men," wrote Madison, "the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

- In one very important sense, then, the doctrine of checks and balances was the remedy of the federalist leaders for the problem of public opinion.

CONGRESS FAILS TO ATTRACT TALENT
- Congress ceased to attract the eminent as it lost direct influence on the shaping of national policy.


DO WE REALLY NEED MR. SMITH TO GO TO WASHINGTON?
- There is no systematic, adequate, and authorized way for Congress to know what is going on in the world. The theory is that the best man of each district brings the best wisdom of his constituents to a central place, and that all these wisdoms combined are all the wisdom that Congress needs.

- the sum or a combination of local impressions is not a wide enough base for national policy, and no base at all for the control of foreign policy.

BRING IN SOME PROFESSIONALS
- the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.

- The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of government [i.e voting] rather than with the processes and results.

- What determines the quality of civilization is the use made of power.

*** *** ***

FACTOIDS
- bunkum /ˈbəNGkəm / buncombe I. noun ‹informal› ‹dated› nonsense • they talk a lot of bunkum about their products.– origin mid 19th cent. (originally buncombe): named after Buncombe County in North Carolina, mentioned in an inconsequential speech made by its congressman solely to please his constituents (c. 1820).

- Kriegspiel= German word for ‘war game’

BONUS
- Video on Walter Lippmann, public opinion, and WWI propaganda (long-ish but is a good overview of the book’s contents): https://youtu.be/e-t77-Zr8po

HAHA
- [Damn, this book is old...] “...we maintain embassies in Tokio and Peking”
Profile Image for Diogenes Grief.
516 reviews
January 12, 2020
Why it’s taken me so long to discover this work is possibly a matter of pure serendipity. Lippmann was mentioned in an Aeon vid-article not long ago (https://aeon.co/videos/before-chomsky...), and that piqued my interest. It’s not about the screaming dude (sometimes, rarely, a chick—e.g., Emma Goldman, Kathleen Cleaver, Greta Thunberg) on the soapbox; it’s about the sheeple that spread the gospel of said screaming dude, and most importantly how prime media outlets parrot the screaming dude and shape the—you guessed it—public opinion that infests the unfolding of History. This is the oceanic force of Public Opinion that wages wars and causes schisms and demonizes others and poisons the wells of Truth with disinformation, propaganda, and abject lies. From religious leaders to politicians to CEOs, from popes to presidents to parliaments, we now exist in a world of metamorphic information. Your tailored news feeds preach the gospel of whatever multi-spectrum flavors you choose to subscribe to, as we wrap ourselves up in cherry-picked identities, even to the point of gender. What a wonderful world . . . Lippmann saw this happening during WWI. It’s only gotten exponentially worse as the goblin drums of ignorance pound for WWIII.

Think of 9/11 and all the flamboyant, empty rhetoric the W. Bush White House was shoving down our throats as the twin towers fell in 24-hour cycles for months on end, how the prime media outlets jumped aboard the bandwagon without question or criticism, and how so many dumb Americans slapped those made-in-China yellow ribbon and “support your troops” magnets on their cars and trucks. I was one of YOUR troops, and I’m thoroughly disgusted and ashamed to have been apart of that horrendous farce that destabilized the Middle East and north Africa and brought death and misery to so many millions of Iraqis and others in those regions of the Earth. If you’re not aware of the Afghanistan Papers, don’t be surprised; most media outlets chose not to cover it (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphi...) Bottom line: those in power lied to us, and most media outlets failed to ask the hard questions. We were duped by leaders of both parties, and have been, for the last two decades—not unlike Vietnam in some terribly harsh ways. When will the madness cease? Most likely when warmongering is no longer profitable. (I started writing this before Trump issued the drone-strike against Suleimani; may the tit-for-tat “War on Terror” go forth for another hundred years, or may a giant comet cleave this planet in twain, ridding us of so much mindless myopia.)

I feel it’s a losing battle in a very protracted war, this War on Truth. The canary in the coal mine is long since dead. The unregulated media, the unregulated internet, politicians without morals, and military leaders drinking the cool-aid of some abstract victory parade, have allowed the deplorables and troll farms and militant foreign cyber-units a solid foothold on the dissemination of disinformation and the fomentation of conspiracies and lies, which “the Right” seems to embrace far easier than “the Left”. The predators of deception know their target audiences—they are undereducated, lack even basic critical thinking skills, and are suckered by modern-day televangelists of every stripe, and these deplorable forces prey upon these demographics fully, sowing dissent, division, and open hostility. Disinformation is now weaponized, and we are all pawns in the great chess game for the Future. Lippmann published this in 1922. Sadly, it is still extremely relevant. Adam Gopnik, in a book review of how dictatorships conform to a style, summarized the difference between Left and Right methodologies well: “Where the Marxist heritage, being theory-minded and principle-bound, involves the primacy of the text, right-wing despotism, being romantic and charismatic, is buoyed by the shared spell cast between an orator and his mob” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...). Isn’t it interesting how one side favors the written word, while the other side favors the screaming dude on the soapbox, across cultures and creeds? The books reviewed basically looked at dictators before the Internet. Does Twitter now count as a forum for screeds with our 8-second attention spans? I hardly think so. Any moron can hammer vitriol through his keyboard these days. Every village idiot has a pocket computer, and Sinclair Broadcasting, Fox News, Breitbart, Alex Jones, Russian cyber units, and the basement-dwelling demagogues on 4Chan/8Chan know this intimately. It is a War on Truth, and Facts, and elemental Morality.

“At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply. So far as the facts of personality, of the environment and of memory are different, by so far the rules of the code are difficult to apply with success. Now every moral code has to conceive human psychology, the material world, and tradition some way or other. But in the codes that are under the influence of science, the conception is known to be a hypothesis, whereas in the codes that come unexamined from the past or bubble up from the caverns of the mind, the conception is not taken as an hypothesis demanding proof or contradiction, but as a fiction accepted without question. In the one case, amnestying is humble about his beliefs, because he knows they are tentative and incomplete; in the other he is dogmatic, because his belief is a completed myth. The moralist who submits to the scientific discipline knows that though he does not know everything, he is in the way of knowing something; the dogmatist, using a myth, believes himself to share part of the insight of omniscience, though he lacks the criteria by which to tell truth from error. For the distinguishing mark of a myth is that truth and error, fact and fable, report and fantasy, are all on the same plane of credibility.

The math is, then not necessarily false. It might happen to be wholly true. It may happen to be partly true. If it has affected human conduct a long time, it is almost certain to contain much that is profoundly and importantly true. What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate truths from its errors. For that power comes only by realizing that no human opinion, whatever its supposed origin, is too exalted for the test of evidence, that every opinion is only somebody’s opinion. And if you ask why the test of evidence is preferable to any other, there is no answer unless you are willing to use the test in order to test it” (pp. 115-6).

Pretty clever. Basically what I think he’s trying to say is exactly what Fantasyland summarized profoundly: magical thinking, then in the ashes of the First World War, and so much more powerfully today in the moral lawlessness of the World-wide Web, has bewitched untold millions.

But after going deep into the issue of stereotypes and moral codes, Lippmann summarizes: “That is one reason why it is so dangerous to generalize about human nature. A loving father can be a sour boss, an earnest municipal reformer, and rapacious jingo abroad. His family life, his business career, his politics, and his foreign policy rest on totally different versions of what others are like and of how he should act. These versions differ by [moral] codes in the same person, the codes differ somewhat among persons in the same social set, differ widely as between social sets, and between two nations, or two colors, may differ to the point where there is no common assumption whatever. That is why people professing the same stock of religious beliefs can go to war. The element of their belief which determines conduct is that view of the facts which they assume.

That is where [moral] codes enter so subtly and so pervasively into the making of public opinion. The orthodoxy theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education [in 1922 USA], a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them. That is why, with the best will in the world, the news policy of a journal tends to support its editorial policy; why a capitalist sees one set of facts, and certain aspects of human nature, literally sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and the socialist pattern of stereotypes. ‘There are no classes in America,’ writes an American editor. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,’ says the Communist Manifesto. If you have the editor’s pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts that confirm it, vaguely and ineffectively those that contradict. If you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for different things, but you will see with a totally different emphasis what you and the editor happen to see in common” (pp. 117-8).

This is a scholarly work that spans a spectrum, and even though it’s dated, it is easy enough to see the parallelisms between then and now. He examines the failings of mass media (newspapers) and what it takes to tell the Truth (“The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth. As our minds become deeply aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices. And the destruction of a prejudice, through painful at first, because of its connection with our self-respect, gives an immense relief and a fine pride when it is successfully done” [p. 368]); he advocates for social science to be taken seriously and professionally; he goes back to Plato and Aristotle to philosophize about what makes good, honest, authentic, and self-less politicians (“So many of the grimaces men make at each other go with a flutter of their pulse, that they are not all of them important. And where so much is uncertain, where so many actions have to be carried out on guesses, the demand upon the reserves of mere decency is enormous, and it is necessary to live as if good will would work. We cannot prove in every instance that it will, nor why hatred, intolerance, suspicion, bigotry, secrecy, fears, and lying are the seven deadly sins against public opinion. We can only insist that they have no place in the appeal to reason, that in the longer run they are a poison; and taking our stand upon a view of the world which outlasts our own predicaments, and our own lives, we can cherish a hearty prejudice against them” [pp. 374-5]); and, he attempts to disentangle the various forms of collaborative community (“The present fundamentally invisible system of government is so intricate that most people have given up trying to follow it, and because they do not try, they are tempted to think it comparatively simple. It is, on the contrary, elusive, concealed, opaque” [p. 353]).

This might be the most portentous of Lippmann’s reflections however, after explaining the creation of national public opinion leading the US into WWI, and what transpired with President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech in 1918, a perfect utilization of mass media at that time to manufacture consent through propaganda:
“Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a 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 reply upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach” (p. 228).

I believe, with sad humility, that the United States of America is going through its death throes. There is no way to bridge the chasm we’ve created. The Soviet Union experiment burned out in under eighty years before it devolved into a strong-armed plutocracy, but that was a bloody disaster from the very beginning. The US is doing likewise, albeit more slowly, but the pace is accelerating, and I wonder if the endgame will be strangely similar. I don’t think the capitulation of the entire GOP to a demented moron, a pathological liar (https://apnews.com/8e0783c70703d7b041...), and a crotch-grabbing racist is a desperate grasp at what’s left of their power-hold. I think a poorly educated populace, the disenfranchisement of millions within the non-caucasian lower classes, the disease of rabid disinformation (thanks in large part to the elimination of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now the complete and utter lack of accountability upon the Social Media moguls), as well as the astounding amount of money pissed away on the election process itself, are all symptoms of what could be the end of this tumultuous Republic. In 2008, Fareed Zakaria published The Post-American World. In December of 2019, Yoni Appelbaum wrote a depressing article on “How America Ends” (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...). We are living in the deathgasms of Zakaria’s idea, as the wrecking ball of Trump and his cronies and sycophant followers pull us all into the abyss of History, exactly as bin Laden and Putin and Xi Jinping dreamt/dream about. Like the melting of the ice caps, this is a slow-motion process, and most people have incredibly short attention spans, are easily distracted by banal pap, and have neither an accurate sense of history nor an honest vision of the future. They want what they want exactly when they want it. This is our undoing, and the forces against us know that precisely.
7 reviews
March 27, 2022
Cleary an incredible insight into the views of a man who had great influence over leaders in economics, media, and government throughout the 20th century in the U.S. There are valid arguments here about stereotypes and biases that all people have that might hinder their ability to make good decisions in society. However, as many have noted, at the core of Lippmann's worldview is a distrust of ordinary people and their capacity for knowing what's in their best interests.

I found much of this to be a slog, more than I expected, but a very worthwhile read.
Profile Image for Vel Veeter.
3,605 reviews62 followers
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April 18, 2023
I kept finding myself thinking that this book is about the most direct precursor to the career of Neil Postman and other political commentators (Postman being political, but mostly writing about media and technology and education) that I could otherwise imagine. There's a part of me that didn't really know what I was heading into with this book and had kind of managed to expect a kind of HL Mencken type book, and maybe that's because I was layering Walter Lippmann with Walter Winchell, and because the audiobook reader of this book sounded enough like Keith Olberman to make me think of Mencken.

But instead of Mencken, we get someone more akin to later political commentators and thinkers like Richard Hofstadter. This book is not a criticism of mass culture, public opinion, the media, and propaganda, but instead a very clearly articulated expository examination of those ideas. It's a breakthrough book because so much of what you read in this book is not only still true to today (with necessary changes because of technology --- Lippmann is writing this before tv and more or less before radio).

He begins with an image of a group citizens from various nations sitting around a parlor not knowing that WWI has just erupted and in the absence of news from that front, they do not know yet they are enemies. And for some amount of time, there's a gap between the actual events and the knowledge where they find themselves. He uses this to sort of explain the basic concept of his whole book, about how people form opinions on news, politics, war, etc out of nothing, what influences those decisions, what can influence those decisions, and how that process works within individuals and what it says about them.

The book then is primarily a discussion of multiple venues of opinion such as politics, the media (specifically newspapers), local versus national and international idea, political parties etc. I won't get into all the different spaces, but there's a lot of very clear insight here, and he addresses that the overflow of information because of mass media (which will only get more massive) how created the need, the responsibility, and the inevitability of needing principles guiding how these decisions are made or else they will be manipulated. We know, and he knows, it will manipulated of course.
Profile Image for Joanna Derm..
71 reviews42 followers
December 29, 2022
I don't think I've underlined in a book more! This was a brilliant read up until its middle. Lippmann starts strong, outlining all the factors forming public opinion and manages to convince that "what we know is we know nothing" - there can never be a full view of the story, since we're all tripped over by our low attention spam; our emotions and prejudices; our lack of free time; our differentiating fields of interests; susceptibility to manipulation; language barriers, environment; self-interest, and so much more - enter the unreliable narrator who may or may not have seen inaccurate depictions of the real event. All aforementioned is still relevant today, exactly 100 years after the book was first published. Of course, there are many outdated subjects, such as how slow news would come to us - which is, of course, totally not the case in 2022. But they are hardly a hurdle while reading, quite the contrary - they make you appreciate how far we've come in terms of technology in just one century and they make you question whether your average Joe takes an adequate advantage of the technological splendors around him.

The second half of the book becomes tedious as Lippmann examines with detail more "current" events for the 1920s era, mainly related to American history which I'm not so familiar with. His thought becomes a bit difficult to follow because he writes very long sentences and uses a haughty language.

Some of the many paragraphs I highlighted:

"The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts."

"For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond."

"For the real environment is altoghether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it. (...) The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action."

"We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones. The time and attention are limited that we can spare for the labor of not taking opinions for granted, and we are subject to constant interruption."

"Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors."

"Words, like money, are tokens of value. They represent meaning, therefore, and just as money, their representative value goes up and down. The French word "etonnant" was used by Bossuet with a terrible weight of meaning which it has lost today. A similar thing can be observed with the English word "awful"."

"We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception."

"There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question. In a circle of friends, and in relation to close associates or competitors, there is no shortcut though, and no substitute for, an individualized understanding. Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit."

"Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy."

"The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of the whole class. A great deal of confusion arises when people decline to classify themselves as we have classified them. Prophecy would be so much easier if only they would stay where we put them."

"(...) Generally it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of the absolute shows itself. For we do not like qualifying adverbs. They clutter up sentences, and interfere with irresistible feeling. We prefer most to more, least to less, we dislike the words rather, perhaps, if, or, but, toward, not quite, almost, temporarily, partly. Yet nearly every opinion about public affairs needs to be deflated by some word of this sort. But in our free moments everything tends to behave absolutely, one hundred percent, everywhere, forever. "
"But it is also true, that no visual idea is significant to us until it has enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains one of the objects which do not matter."

"People differ widely in their susceptibility to ideas. There are some in whom the idea of a starving child in Russia is practically as vivid as a starving child within sight. There are others who are almost incapable of being excited by a distant idea. There are many gradations between. And there are people who are insensitive to facts, and aroused only by ideas."

"(...) This fact is obscured because the mass is constantly exposed to suggestion. It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken. It hears reports, not objective as the facts are, but already stereotyped to a certain pattern of behavior. Thus the ostensible leader often finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor."

"Nobody thinks for a moment that he ought to pay for his newspaper. He expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper that suits him."

"The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. (...) At its best, the press is a servant and a guardian of institutions; at its worst it is a means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends."
Author 12 books17 followers
August 16, 2016
There is a lot of information in this book. Indeed, I had a respectful amount of annotation from my reading; however, I must return to my notes to retain what I read. If I were to rate this book on the material, the theories, concepts and conclusions, I would rate it as a five. However, it requires so much work to get through the intellectual psycho-babble of much of his writing it is just not worth the effort for the average person. For this reason, I rated it a three.

It seemed to me that his writing was more his effort to display his erudition than to communicate with his readers. I believe that an author should write so that a bond is created with the readers in such a way that they can readily understand what the author is trying to communicate. In this book, however, Mr. Lippman virtually shouts, "Look at me! Look how erudite I am."
Profile Image for Jindřich Mynarz.
115 reviews15 followers
January 29, 2018
At times wonderfully poetic and pregnant, other times needlessly obtuse. A classic, or a piece of prescient writing, some might call it, the Public Opinion delivers highly relevant food for thought on media in (post-)democratic world.
Profile Image for Alan.
14 reviews6 followers
July 20, 2014
In times like these, when we sleep with screens feeding us images of war, it is important to go back to this classic.

Emotions run high when photographs, pictures and videos rule our understanding of foreign affairs.

It is equally important to realize how little information we actually have access to.

Not so much has changed since the age of television:public emotions get mobilized together with armed forces, and, as we develop an aggressive tunnel-vision the enemy starts condensing into a target to strike .

We must remember that, of all public emotions, anger is easier to ignite.
Profile Image for Lyndon Bailey.
33 reviews1 follower
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March 19, 2016
Written beautifully and with penetrating insights on every page, this book was a hard read due to the format and the text but the language itself, while not challenging, is elegantly wrought.

You'll probably hate his conservative apologism and barely concealed authoritarianism (not to mention shilling for the future PR industry) but it is well worth reading as his critiques of politics and exposure of the problems faced by democracies deserve attention.
Profile Image for Robert.
51 reviews
June 25, 2019
I agreed with many of his main points on stereotyping, democracy, propaganda, and the inability for a potential voter to actually understand beyond their personal realm. But, man-o-man, this is not what I would call a "fun" read. Lots of 1920s news references and lots of rambling prose. I know I'm not the target audience here, but geez liven it up Walter.
178 reviews2 followers
April 16, 2020
Review: “Public Opinion”
Walter Lippman, 1922.
Via Audible.

I became aware of this book while listening to Jill Lepore’s “These Truths” – an excellent book. This book, published in 1922 was mentioned as a keystone in the study of how Journalists and others “form” Public Opinion.

The context here is a major foreign policy issue – such as American’s entrance in World War 1. There existed at the time the original “America First” organization – advocating neutrality. Within 18 Months popular culture was changed so as to support America’s entrance into the War. A popular 1916 song was “I didn’t raise my boy to be Soldier” – a popular song in 1917 was “Over There”.

A variant of this idea was taken up later in the book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, 1988 – the “Consent” here references the consent of the governed.

This is an excellent book – as relevant (perhaps more relevant) today than when it was written.

There are numerous take aways from this book – which resonated – a few:

• Lippmann observes that an individual cannot conceive of (or has great difficulty conceiving of) things they have not experienced.
• Lippmann gives the example of Americans living in America attempting to understand the carnage of WW 1.
• Lippmann gives one example with reference to WW1 – that the French High Command generated press releases released to the French public during and after the battle of Verdun where the phrase “machine guns mowed the enemy down”; and “artillery fire mowed the enemy down”. Not only were these phrases not entirely true – the French took more casualties ~400,000 than the Germans ~350000 – but also (these French press releases) diverted the French Public’s attention from the fact that this battle was fought on French soil with the French Army on the defensive.
• This technique – use of the phrase “machine guns mowed the enemy down” was successful with the French public – because in Lippmann’s opinion – the Public has a ‘picture in its head’ about what “machine guns mowed the enemy down” means/looks like – this picture is the first thing that comes to mind when the phrase is invoked. Indeed, Lippmann observes that words – that evoke a picture – that evokes emotion(s) is a model that has been shown to work.
• Lippmann goes on to opine that when the United States was founded – it was predicated upon small (New England) towns – where the inhabitants only verified their own experiences…”as far as they can see” – which is why Jefferson and others thought a free press was necessary in the United States to inform and assist the inhabitants about things that were outside of their individual experiences.
o It would be interesting to discuss what Lippmann would make of today’s internet and its impact on society and public opinion.
• Lippmann has a model that there is no one public opinion – but a series of public opinion – where politicians attempt to have a broad political platform (or unifying slogan or symbol) to be attractive to enough segments so as to win an election.
• Lippmann warns the reader to be way of politicians who:
o Create an argument with very selected and incomplete facts;
o Interpret these facts (above) in a manner to inflame the readers emotions (“…you’re being ripped off…”), and;
o Closing with a series of powerful but ambiguous words – justice, liberty, true Americanism….which public policies about a particular subject provide the public with liberty and etc. and how do they do this?
• I heard Lippman opine how about an individual might think about whether the Government is working for me – I heard something akin to President Roosevelt’s 01/06/1941 speech about the Four Freedoms:
o Freedom of Speech and Assembly.
o Freedom to worship God in his own way.
o Freedom from want.
o Freedom from fear.

• Finally, I heard Lippmann question as to whether Reason was used (then) in Politics.

A keystone book – very illuminating – should be of interest to those who think about the current state of ‘Politics’ – and Mass Communication. After having read this and other similar books – I’ve “sworn off” – Cable TV News – which have become an outlet to Manufacture Outrage.

Carl Gallozzi
cgallozzi@comcast.net
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480 reviews97 followers
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May 26, 2021
The question is, how to deal with the "unseen environment?"

Lippmann sees the main driver of conflict as not class but "partial access to the facts." A bit fantastical, but let's keep going. The premise of this book is that the main obstacle to an informed public was not their lack of intellectual ability but the largeness and complexity of the world picture and the inability of the individual to comprehend its nuances in the time available. With the explosion of productive capacities through industrial manufacturing as well as communicative technologies such as the telephone, telegraph, and newspaper, events traveled farther and had much greater consequences than had previously been the case. Instead of a faithful picture of events, the public has, rather, a rough caricature. Since it is impossible for the public to have a faithful understanding of all events at once, for the most part the public sees pictures in their heads, nothing more. These pictures are essentially symbols and fictions. These fictions are, according to Lippmann, “an important part of the machinery of communication,” since we do not ever grasp a full picture of the nature of events so much as we feel aroused by the mental picture of an event. People, modern consumers of news media, the constituents of public opinion, then, respond powerfully not to events but to the fictions which surround events.

It is, then, the group of insiders, the experts, who, like the philosopher kings of Plato, ought to devote themselves to curating data and information, creating visuals that attempt to portray a more reliable picture of the world, to do the work which neither the public nor the journalists have time to do. Lippmann suggests that, perhaps, the investigative experts might be funded by a trust of some sort. These experts would be life tenured so as not to make them publish results for the sake of their re-election or appointment, and ought to have privileged access to examine documents regardless of confidentiality. It’s findings could be made available to universities and their own researchers. Such work would, in short, attempt to render the invisible world, the unseen environment, visible, and make the ability to make informed decisions possible. A fully informed public through the use of such visuals may make possible, Lippmann suggests, a sort of Federalist rule of government by consent rather than coercion.

There is, for the reader of the 21st century, the possibility of a great deal of skepticism. One can’t help but associate the idea of Lippmann’s “intelligence gathering agencies'' with Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, created during the Truman Administration whose objective, while ostensibly meant to gather intelligence for the benefit of good governance, frequently engaged in nefarious acts such as regime change, in an attempt to mold the unseen environment rather than render it intelligible. In the David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard, a stunning history of CIA and Allen Dulles, Talbot remarks that Dulles and CIA, “saw [themselves] as above the nation’s laws and elected leaders, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of personal interests and those of the wealth elite he counted as his friends and clients—colluding with Nazi war criminals and Mafiosi in the process.” With this history behind us, it is hard to find hard sympathy with Lippmann’s dream of elite intelligencers. Truman himself would, in the 60s, write an op-ed declaring CIA as “a cloudy organism of uncertain purpose and appalling power.”

Yet, there is much that remains relevant to Lippmann’s insight in Public Opinion. Lippmann’s illustration of the matrix of mass democracy, journalism, and communication technology in an increasingly sophisticated international world, remains as true as ever, and, perhaps, in novel ways with the development of the internet and social media. Above all the fact of the power of communication and control towards the construction of the pseudo-environment, and the essential opacity of the unseen environment and the growing reliance on expertise due to the hyper-specialization of these environments call for, continue to make up the balance of popular opinion and wise public policy as never before.
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