WALTER LIPPMANN

Extensive life of the famed journalist and theorist of politics and international relations.

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the brilliant son of German Jewish immigrants to New York, was ahead of his time in many ways; as Oxford University researcher Arnold-Forster notes, he may have introduced the word “robot” into English, adapted the word “stereotype” from printing terminology to apply to public opinion, and gave the Cold War its name. Only in his mid-20s when his first two books appeared, Lippmann disliked the narrowness of a growing technocracy, and he championed a certain kind of objectivity in reporting the news, allowing for a writer’s ideas while serving as a buffer to help that writer “cope with the gossip and self-interest that shaped news gathering and production.” Lippmann’s great subject was how public opinion is shaped: partly by journalism, partly by government, partly by events, all ideally informed by fact. Presciently, he noted that “news and truth are not the same thing,” with newspapers and other media not the only vehicle for “carry[ing] the whole burden of popular sovereignty.” In a time of totalitarianism and dawning misinformation and disinformation, he also warned that public opinion could be easily bent, the “opportunities for manipulation…open to anyone who understands the process.” Lippmann’s takes on opinion formation are of interest to anyone pressing for social change; he observed, for instance, that the reason woman’s suffrage became a reality was that activists “had kept suffrage in the news,” doing exactly that shaping by dint of not going away. Arnold-Forster’s examination of Lippmann’s nuanced support for and alternating critiques of the New Deal goes into a bit too much detail, but overall his book is a welcome addition to the literature of both journalism and the rise of the anti-communist left and modern liberalism.

A long-needed biography of a once-influential figure who merits rediscovery.