First published in 1922, Public Opinion is a foundational work in media studies, politics, and sociology. Walter Lippmann examines how public opinion is formed and manipulated in democratic societies, with a particular focus on mass media and modern institutions. It has been praised as highly influential, with James W. Carey calling it “the founding book of modern journalism.”
Throughout the text, Lippmann brings up the context of the “pseudo-environment.” The world is too complex for us to fully understand, so we construct mental representations, or pseudo-environments, to make sense of it. These representations are informed by personal experience to some extent, but stereotypes and the media also play crucial roles. As Lippmann says, “For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.”
I feel I intuitively know what a stereotype is, but if you were to ask me for a formal definition of the word, I’d probably shrug and say, “I don’t actually know, a generalisation or something.” Lippmann defines it very nicely, saying that stereotypes are not necessarily false, but oversimplifications of what people and groups are. This becomes dangerous when treated as complete truths on a subject. They make for mental shortcuts that help the individual navigate the complexity of the world.
They distort reality too. Lippmann was one of the first to suggest that the media have a central role in shaping public opinion, and they usually do this by presenting selective or framed representations of people and events. This is where the term “manufacturing consent” came from, which Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman used in their book of the same name.
This begs the question as to how one can make informed decisions in a democratic system, given the mass media’s control of the flow of information. The gap between real-world complexity, and how one perceives the world, grows wider. Lippmann questions how informed and rational the public can be. He says, “The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can only be managed by a specialised class.”
And if you think he’s being elitist, you have to remember that Public Opinion is a product of its time. Expert opinion and reliable sources were expensive, but the papers reporting based on such sources were a welcome antidote to the yellow press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The New York Times exemplified this with their motto, “All the news that’s fit to print.” What Lippmann proposes is a specialised class of professionals (journalists, scientists, political analysts, etc.) to analyse the facts for the public. Which is what expertise is supposed to be. While he doesn’t dismiss democracy outright as a model of governance, he cautions that society needs to be more cautious in how much faith it puts in human cognition and communication.
Over one-hundred years old, and maybe elitist in some ways, Public Opinion remains essential reading in contemporary debates about the media’s role in society, and the challenges of maintaining a democracy in a complex set of systems. That, and the text laid the groundwork for analysis and debate of agenda-setting theory, framing theory, modern critiques of media bias, and the study of propaganda and information manipulation.
Lawrence Deveney 