Now the reporter, if he is to earn his living, must nurse his personal contacts with the eye-witnesses and privileged informants. If he is openly hostile to those in authority, he will cease to be a reporter unless there is an opposition party is the inner circle who can feed him news.
Failing that, he will know precious little of what is going on. Most people seem to believe that, when they meet a war correspondent or a special writer form the Peace Conference, they have seen a man who has seen the things he wrote about. Far from it. Nobody, for example, saw this war. Neither the men in the trenches nor the commanding general. The men saw their trenches, their billets, sometimes they saw an enemy trench, but nobody, unless it be the aviators, saw a battle. What the correspondents saw, occasionally, was the terrain over which a battle had been fought; but what they reported day by day was what they were told at press headquarters, and of that only what they were allowed to tell.
At the Peace Conference the reporters were allowed to meet periodically the four least important members of the Commission, men who themselves had considerable difficulty in keeping track of things, as any reporter who was present will testify. This and the French press, than which there is nothing more censored and inspired, a local English trade-journal of the expatriates, the gossip of the Crillon lobby, the Majestic, and the other official hotels, constituted the source of the news upon which American editors and the American people have had to base one of the most difficult judgments of their history.
I should perhaps add that there were a few correspondents occupying privileged positions with foreign governments. They wore ribbons in their button-holes to prove it. They were in many ways the most useful correspondents because they always revealed to the trained reader just what it was that their governments wished America to believe. The news accumulated by the reporter from his witnesses has to be selected, if for no other reason than that the cable facilities are limited.
At the cable office several varieties of censorship intervene. The legal censorship in Europe is political as well as military, and both words are elastic. It has been applied, not only to the substance of the news, but to the mode of presentation, and even to the character of the type and the position on the page. But the real censorship on the wires is the cost of transmission.
This in itself is enough to limit any expensive competition or any significant independence. The big Continental news agencies are subsidized. Censorship operates also through congestion and the resultant need of a system of priority. Congestion makes possible good and bad service, and undesirable messages are not infrequently served badly.
When the report does reach the editor, another series of interventions occurs. The editor is a man who may know all about something, but he can hardly be expected to know all about everything. Yet he has to decide the question which is of more importance than any other in the formation of opinions, the question where attention is to be directed.
In a newspaper the heads are the foci of attention, the odd corners the fringe; and whether one aspect of the news or another appears in the centre or at the periphery makes all the difference in the world. The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. Now the power to determine each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind. The ordering is not done by one man, but by a host of men, who are on the whole curiously unanimous in their selection and in their emphasis.
Once you know the party and social affiliations of a newspaper, you can predict with considerable certainty the perspective in which the news will be displayed. This perspective is by no means altogether deliberate. Though the editor is ever so much more sophisticated than all but a minority of his readers, his own sense of relative importance is determined by rather standardized constellations of ideas.
He very soon comes to believe that his habitual emphasis is the only possible one. Why the editor is possessed by a particular set of ideas is a difficult question of social psychology, of which no adequate analysis has been made. But we shall not be far wrong if we say that he deals with the news in reference to the prevailing mores of his social group.
These mores are of course in a large measure the product of what previous newspapers have said; and experience shows that, in order to break out of this circle, it has been necessary at various times to create new forms of journalism, such as the national monthly, the critical weekly, the circular, the paid advertisement of ideas, in order to change the emphasis which had become obsolete and habit-ridden.
Into this extremely refractory, and I think increasingly disserviceable mechanism, there has been thrown, especially since the outbreak of war, another monkey-wrench—propaganda. The word, of course, covers a multitude of sins and a few virtues. The virtues can be easily separated out, and given a new name, either advertisement or advocacy. Thus, if the National Council of Belgravia wishes to publish a magazine out of its own funds, under its own imprint, advocating the annexation of Thrums, no one will object.
But if, in support of that advocacy, it vies to the press stories that are lies about the atrocities committed in Thrums; or, worse still, if those stories seem to come from Geneva, or Amsterdam, not from the press-service of the National Council of Belgravia, then Belgravia is conducting propaganda. If, after arousing a certain amount of interest in itself, Belgravia then invites a carefully selected correspondent, or perhaps a labor leader, to its capital, puts him up at the best hotel, rides him around in limousines, fawns on him at banquets, lunches with him very confidentially, and then puts him through a conducted tour so that he shall see just what will create the desired impression, then again Belgravia is conducting propaganda.
Or if Belgravia happens to possess the greatest trombone-player in the world, and if she sends him over to charm the wives of influential husbands, Belgravia is, in a less objectionable way, perhaps, committing propaganda, and making fools of the husbands. Now, the plain fact is that out of the troubled areas of the world the public receives practically nothing that is not propaganda.
Lenin and his enemies control all the news there is of Russia, and no court of law would accept any of the testimony as valid in a suit to determine the possession of a donkey. I am writing many months after the Armistice. The Senate is at this moment beginning to consider the question whether it will guarantee the frontiers of Poland; but what we learn of Poland we learn from the Polish Government and the Jewish Committee.
Judgment on the vexed issues of Europe is simply out of the question for the average American; and the more cocksure he is, the more certainly is he the victim of some propaganda. These instances are drawn from foreign affairs, but the difficulty at home, although less flagrant, is nevertheless real. Theodore Roosevelt, and Leonard Wood after him, have told us to think nationally.
It is not easy. It is easy to parrot what those people say who live in a few big cities and who have constituted themselves and the only true and authentic voice of America. But beyond that it is difficult. I live in New York and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn is interested in. It is possible, with effort, much more effort than most people can afford to give, for me to know what a few organized bodies like the Non-Partisan League, the National Security League, the American Federation of Labor, and the Republican National Committee are up to; but what the unorganized workers, and the unorganized farmers, the shopkeepers, the local bankers and boards of trade are thinking and feeling, no one has any means of knowing, except perhaps in a vague way at election time.
To think nationally means, at least, to take into account the major interests and needs and desires of this continental population; and for that each man would need a staff of secretaries, traveling agents, and a very expensive press-clipping bureau.
We do not think nationally because the facts that count are not systematically reported and presented in a form we can digest. Our most abysmal ignorance occurs where we deal with the immigrant. For his culture and his aspirations, for his high gifts of hope and variety, we have neither eyes nor ears. The immigrant colonies are like holes in the road which we never notice until we trip over them.
Now, men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.
But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts, not what actually is. He assumed that public opinion was about the mass of individuals possessing a correct representation of the world, and since they could never do this, they had to be locked out of the decision-making process.
But Dewey insisted that political knowledge, in a democracy, could only come about through conversation among and between citizens. The only reality that matters is the reality that citizens collectively construct. Again, Dewey put it well:. There is no limit to the intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another in the communications of the local community.
That and that only gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson, said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.
At the same time, local newspapers are dying out and political discourse is becoming increasingly nationalized, which means most issues are abstract and dominated by tribal allegiance and caricatured right-left narratives. Lippmann feared that the citizenry would abandon the public square and give themselves over to propaganda. The world seems to be careening into more and more disorder, and American politics in particular is hopelessly ensnarled in partisan dysfunction.
But here we are, in , still humming along, still the most influential country in the world, still the richest and the most dynamic economy on the planet.
For all its problems and there are many , democracy has managed to thrive. And the democratic world, over time, has gotten more stable, more wealthy, and more tolerant. Maybe the myth of democracy is just that — a myth. Voters will often make egregious choices, and sometimes those choices produce horrifying outcomes. Still, the system, as a whole, has proven incredibly resilient, and a far better alternative to non-democratic systems, which lead invariably to corruption and oppression.
Democracies are also prone to disorder and corruption, but these are ineluctable features of any political system comprised of selfish and flawed human beings. Lippmann was shaken by the insanity of World War I, and so he thought something — anything — had to be done to keep the democratic world from descending into another war.
The shock of Brexit and a Trump presidency has sent many observers myself included into a panic. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I interviewed Jason Brennan , a Georgetown political theorist, who argued for a Lippmann-esque epistocracy to replace traditional democracy. But I could just as easily argue that Brennan, like Lippmann, has it precisely backwards.
Instead of abandoning democracy, maybe what we need is more and better democracy. Maybe, as Dewey taught, we need to educate and empower more citizens. Like many progressive intellectuals, he too became strongly disappointed by American conduct at the Paris Peace Conference and moved away from Wilsonian idealism, beginning to develop many doubts around the illusions of the progressive era.
He continued to work on his regular columns and collaborating to various magazines and academic reviews. He published four major books and various other pamphlets and collections of articles and speeches. As I have argued in my recent book, Walter Lippmann. Una biografia intellettuale Regalzi, , the investigation of the relationship between freedom and democracy in contemporary societies was a major life-long effort.
This is the period when he sharpened his focus on these themes. However, we should avoid the frequent mistake of considering him a journalist who only wrote on news, propaganda and problems related to communication.
He was, in fact, much more than that. That considered, it should be clear that the focus of his work was not communication theory but rather the limits of democracy. He was not alone in his doubts about common assumptions regarding representative democracy. Edward Bernays, who like Lippmann worked for the Committee on Public Information during the war years, was attracted by the same topic.
In addition, several members of the Chicago School were studying these themes, along with Harold D. John Dewey, perhaps the greatest twentieth century American philosopher, also demonstrated his interest in these questions.
Rather, Lippmann was a true democrat who, in effect, was arguing for the necessity to think beyond the way the theory of democracy had been classically formulated. War propaganda demonstrated for the first time in world history how easy it was to build consent and to forge opinion s. Once it was understood that this could be done, democracy obviously seemed to be facing serious problems.
For example, in he showed how the authoritative New York Times had been unable to give its readers adequate coverage of the events of the Bolshevik revolution. That same year, Lippmann published a pamphlet entitled Liberty and the News , where he argued that the present crisis of democracy was a consequence of the crisis of journalism, unable to fulfill its duties correctly, and suggested some reforms towards the improvement and professionalization of journalism.
Both these authors offered what Lippmann considered an inadequate theory of liberty because they both posited doctrines whose premises offered the bases for subsequent exceptions. The books he had published in the previous decade, which were widely appreciated, were part of the progressive tradition.
However, they were not groundbreaking even though they helped to make of him one of the most brilliant young intellectuals of that era. The crisis of politics involved democracy and the rights of men.
Lippmann did not mean to destroy these categories of political thought, but sought to re-consider them in order to make them suitable for the contemporary world. Through this process, he did not create new definitions or new concepts, but his critiques were fundamental to the development of his perspective during the following years.
Using the works of Graham Wallas and the psychology of Sigmund Freud, Lippmann illustrated the characteristics of a plurality of pseudo-environments, radically different from the external world, where every individual collected his stereotypes and all the information coming from the outside.
In effect, people have a hard time in understanding the complexity of contemporary world. For this reason, Lippmann expressed his doubts about the existence of authentic public opinion, a view that was shared by people who were well informed and interested in public affairs. Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs.
The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters Lippmann, , p. This was a theory that could only fit the needs of very small communities, but was completely inadequate for great twentieth-century democracies and larger states.
Even if Lippmann did not pose the question this way, we may assert that it was a courageous attempt at formulating a new democratic theory, smacking of elitism. This work is not just a simple integration or a sequel to the most known Public Opinion. Moving from the conclusions of Public Opinion , The Phantom Public reflects a greater pessimism about the human condition and about democracy. The American author Walter Lippmann was his era's most respected journalist and a significant contributor to its political thought.
The only child of well-to-do, second-generation German-Jewish parents, Walter Lippmann studied at a private school in his native New York City.
His parents took him often to Europe to absorb its culture. He completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard in three years with the highest honors and was an editor of the Harvard Monthly and cofounder of the Harvard Socialist Club.
He remained at Harvard another year as assistant to George Santayana in the philosophy department. Also, the famous philosopher William James made himself available to Lippmann for private seminars. In Lincoln Steffens, editor of the muckraking Everybody's Magazine, took Lippmann on as his secretary.
0コメント