"Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible." -- Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann (23 September 1889 — 14 December 1974) was an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator who gained notoriety for the introduction of the concept of Cold War for the first time in the world. Lippmann was twice awarded (1958 and 1962) a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, “Today and Tomorrow”.
"A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.""A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.""Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.""Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.""He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.""In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.""In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents.""Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.""It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.""It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.""Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.""Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.""Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.""No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.""Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.""Only the consciousness of a purpose that is mightier than any man and worthy of all men can fortify and inspirit and compose the souls of men.""Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.""People that are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.""Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main ballpark.""Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak.""Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism.""The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.""The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.""The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.""The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.""The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.""The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.""The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.""The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.""The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.""The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.""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 a whole class.""The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.""There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation.""There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.""Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.""We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.""We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.""What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.""When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.""When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.""When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.""When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.""Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much."
Walter Lippmann was born on 23 September 1889, in New York City, to Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann; his upper-middle class German-Jewish family, took annual holidays in Europe. At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating upon philosophy and languages (he spoke German and French), and earned his degree in three years, graduating as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society. Prior to his career in journalism, he was an Olympic gold medalist in the javelin.
Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and a philosopher who tried to reconcile the tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920 book Liberty and the News.
In 1913, Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, Lippmann became an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points speech.
Lippmann had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had sympathy for communism. After Lippmann had become famous, the Golos spy ring used Mary Price, his secretary, to garner information on items Lippmann chose not to write about or names of Lippmann's sources, often not carried in stories, but of use to the Soviet Ministry for State Security.
Walter Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems. He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was biased and inaccurate. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize-winning column "Today and Tomorrow," he published several books. Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. He argued that people—including journalists—are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking. Humans condense ideas into symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public. Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation." Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.
Lippmann saw the purpose of journalism as "intelligence work". Within this role, journalists are a link between policymakers and the public. A journalist seeks facts from policymakers which he then transmits to citizens who form a public opinion. In this model, the information may be used to hold policymakers accountable to citizens. This theory was spawned by the industrial era and some critics argue the model needs rethinking in post-industrial societies.
Though a journalist himself, he held no assumption of news and truth being synonymous. For him the “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” A journalist’s version of the truth is subjective and limited to how he constructs his reality. The news, therefore, is “imperfectly recorded” and too fragile to bear the charge as “an organ of direct democracy.”
To his mind, democratic ideals had deteriorated, voters were largely ignorant about issues and policies, they lacked the competence to participate in public life and cared little for participating in the political process. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that the stability the government achieved during the patronage era of the 1800s was threatened by modern realities. He wrote that a “governing class” must rise to face the new challenges. He saw the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd — floundering in the “chaos of local opinions."
The basic problem of democracy, he wrote, was the accuracy of news and protection of sources. He argued that distorted information was inherent in the human mind. People make up their minds before they define the facts, while the ideal would be to gather and analyze the facts before reaching conclusions. By seeing first, he argued, it is possible to sanitize polluted information. Lippmann argued that seeing through stereotypes (which he coined in this specific meaning) subjected us to partial truths. Lippmann called the notion of a public competent to direct public affairs a "false ideal." He compared the political savvy of an average man to a theater-goer walking into a play in the middle of the third act and leaving before the last curtain.
Early on Lippmann said the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality." This class is composed of experts, specialists and bureaucrats. The experts, who often are referred to as "elites," were to be a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omnicompetent citizen". Later, in The Phantom Public (1925), he recognized that the class of experts were also, in most respects, outsiders to any particular problem, and hence, not capable of effective action. Philosopher John Dewey (1859—1952) agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed that the public (a composite of many “publics” within society) could form a “Great Community” that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems.
Following the removal from office of Henry A. Wallace in September 1946, Lippmann became the leading public advocate of the need to respect a Soviet sphere of influence in Europe, as opposed to the containment strategy being advocated at the time by people like George F. Kennan.
Lippmann was an informal adviser to several presidents. He had a rather famous feud with Lyndon Johnson over his handling of the Vietnam War, of which Lippmann had become highly critical.
On September 14, 1964, President Johnson presented Lippmann with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A meeting of intellectuals organized in Paris in August 1938 by French philosopher Louis Rougier, Colloque Walter Lippmann was named after Walter Lippmann. Walter Lippmann House at Harvard University, which houses the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, is named after him too. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman used one of Lippmann's catch phrases, the "Manufacture of Consent" for the title of their book, Manufacturing Consent, which contains sections critical of Lippmann's views about the media.
