The "present crisis of western democracy," the 30-year-old
Walter Lippmann announced in 1920, "is a crisis in journalism." A
co-founder of The New Republic in 1914, a Wilson Administration
confidant and Army captain with responsibility for propaganda in Europe
during World War I, Lippmann spoke with authority. And
originality. His view of the crisis was an unhappy one because, as he
went on to argue in Liberty and the News, which was recently
reissued as a slim and attractive paperback, journalism could
never--unaided--provide an accurate account of reality for purposes
of democratic self-government. But whereas other critics of wartime
news coverage sought a journalism not beholden to advertisers or
governments, Lippmann saw the core of journalism's corruption
elsewhere--in its own smug assurance of knowledge and its eagerness to
assert opinion rather than provide facts. Even so, Lippmann offered
suggestions for what editors and reporters could do better. He urged
them to commit themselves to the cardinal virtue of "truthful
reporting" and recognize that opinionmongering, or
what polite society might call "edification," cannot become a
"higher law than truth." In fact, he wrote, "There can be no higher law
in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil."
The "crisis" Lippmann detected in both democracy and journalism
arises because the sheer volume of political affairs in an
interconnected national and global world--the assassination of the
Archduke Ferdinand in the capital of a small Slavic country, after all,
had drawn American farmboys into a world war--surpasses the capacity of
even the most conscientious citizens to monitor. "I know of no man, even
among those who devote all of their time to watching public affairs, who
can even pretend to keep track, at the same time, of his city
government, his state government, Congress, the departments, the
industrial situation, and the rest of the world," he wrote. We depend on
the press in our attempts to make sense of politics--and we
are vulnerable to its weaknesses: "If I lie in a lawsuit involving the
fate of my neighbor's cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million
readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and,
if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible."
For Lippmann, veracity is not easy to attain, nor is its enemy in
journalism primarily or necessarily a matter of government pressure or
corporate ownership. The same year he published Liberty and the
News, Lippmann, assisted by fellow New Republic editor
Charles Merz, published a forty-two-page supplement to the August 4
issue of The New Republic called "A Test of the News," which
dissected the New York Times's coverage of the Russian
Revolution. Lippmann and Merz concluded that the coverage was vastly
distorted, most of all by the hopes and fears of reporters and editors
themselves, who saw in the Bolsheviks what they wanted to see. The
Times assured readers on ninety-one occasions that the
revolutionary regime was near collapse.
Who is to know what is and what is not a lie, Lippmann asks in
Liberty and the News, "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." In Liberty and the News, this is a telling observation;
in Public Opinion, two years later, it is a treatise--still
unsurpassed. The book that made "stereotype" part of everyday usage,
Public Opinion demonstrated how much people--all people--see what
they want to see and hear what they want to hear, and act in the world
based on "the pictures in our heads." When these pictures come from
distant places, brought to us by a press without much self-discipline or
sophistication or intellectual weight, our actions--our votes, our
choices--are at the mercy of the flawed picture of the world that
various media provide.
The "liberty" of Liberty and the News is the oddest and
most idiosyncratic term in the book. Lippmann is not talking about the
liberty of opinion or free expression that John Milton defended in
Areopagitica (1644). In fact, Lippmann takes Milton to task for
conceding free expression only to Protestant views, whose variations he
was indifferent to, while condemning Catholic positions out of hand.
Lippmann argues that liberty is the effort to protect for public use
access to a factual record. It is the freedom to be roped to the mast of
reality and to be freed from allegiance to one or another orthodoxy,
preconception or lie. Liberty "is not so much permission as it is the
construction of a system of information increasingly independent of
opinion." As for opinion journalism, he is caustic. Veracity must come
first, not "edification"--and this from a man who was a regular
contributor to The New Republic, who in 1923 became the editorial
page editor of the New York World and wrote hundreds of
editorials in his years there, and who in the 1930s took on national
prominence as a syndicated opinion columnist. The monuments of placing
one's opinion first, Lippmann writes in Liberty and the News, are
"the Inquisition and the invasion of Belgium."
Lippmann looked beyond journalism for a way out of its impasse.
He held out some hope for journalism schools, and though he had no
specific design for educating reporters he believed that "no amount of
money or effort spent in fitting the right men for this work could
possibly be wasted, for the health of society depends upon the quality
of the information it receives." Yoke the reporters' education to its
only legitimate goal: "a professional training in journalism in which
the ideal of objective testimony is cardinal."
Lippmann also found reason for hope in the emergence of
semi-official institutes of government research and more "specialized
private agencies which attempt to give technical summaries of the work
of various branches of the government." These "political observatories,"
as he called them, could improve reporting by interposing an "expert
political intelligence" between the reality of government and those who
reported on it. Even in the darker view of Phantom Public, which
Lippmann published in 1925, he saw a flicker of light in the fact that
"we live at the mere beginnings of public accounting." There, not in the
newsroom, lies hope for an informational system adequate to
democracy's needs, although Lippmann offers no real analysis of why
the observatories would themselves be immune to opinion.
Why republish this old book? In its new format, it features an
introduction by Lippmann biographer Ronald Steel, who economically
places the book in the context of its day. There's also an afterword,
nearly half as long as Lippmann's book, by the journalist, former
Clinton Administration insider and newly appointed Clinton (Hillary,
that is) adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal begins by briefly and
perceptively characterizing Lippmann's Olympian stance (at once in and
above journalism) and then launches into a lament about the "steady
degeneration of the press over the past few decades." He offers no
evidence of "degeneration" (which would require comparing a deficient
present with a measurably better past) but instead only vents his
frustration that today's media largely parroted Bush Administration
propaganda during the run-up to the Iraq War.
There is no denying Blumenthal's central point, especially since
the New York Times itself apologized, in an editorial note of May
26, 2004, for coverage that was "not as rigorous as it should have
been." But such journalistic failings--and there were many, at the
Times and other outlets--do not demonstrate a "steady
degeneration" of the news media. The press was slow to criticize the
Vietnam War, too; in both the media and in public opinion, there was a
reflexive back-our-boys-in-harm's-way patriotism that did much to secure
a relatively pliant press years into that war. A study of media coverage
of forty-two foreign policy crises between 1945 and 1999 (written by
political scientists John Zaller and Dennis Chiu) found the media to be
consistently, as the article's title puts it, "government's little
helper." The study suggests that docile news coverage was a result of
"source indexing," in which news represents or "indexes" the range of
opinions of leading government officials in the executive and the
Congress, and "power indexing," in which news emphasizes most of all the
views of those with the greatest capacity to "foretell future events."
Coverage is normally docile, in other words, because it concentrates on
the views of government officials whose hands are on or close to the
levers of power.
Was this any different between 2001 and 2003? Why would it have
been, when the conditions for giving the Administration the benefit of
the doubt were so strong? Consider the obstacles to skepticism: Saddam
Hussein was indefensible; 9/11 was traumatizing, and it produced shock
and awe from which we have yet to recover. The Democrats in the Senate
backed the Iraq War. Colin Powell, the Administration official with the
greatest public trust, personally made the case for war. And yes, just
as Lippmann would have expected, journalists accompanying the troops
into Baghdad in those first euphoric days were led by their hope into
believing that maybe, just maybe, the Bush Administration had known
something the rest of us did not.
Blumenthal hopes for a revitalized journalism as "part of a
general reawakening of American democracy," though he doesn't bother to
offer any details about how such a revitalization might occur or what it
would actually entail. Lippmann, in contrast, was not in the
general-reawakening business, although near the end of Liberty and
the News he suggests that substantial change can come "only if
organized labor and militant liberalism set a pace which cannot be
ignored." But what he wishes from such a mobilization is the
establishment of nonpartisan information agencies. Journalism did not
have the horsepower or the moral discipline to picture the political
scene accurately on its own.
If there is a rationale for republishing Liberty and the
News, it surely must be to give Lippmann's diagnosis and
prescriptions a further airing. If we do, we see not only new energy in
journalism education (the effect of which is not easy to know) but clear
evidence that Lippmann's political observatories have taken hold. We
have a Freedom of Information Act (passed in 1966); we have inspectors
general (most of them instituted only in 1978). Whether one looks at the
inspector general at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose
report in November 2005 led instantly to the resignation of the
conservative hack Kenneth Tomlinson, or the recent reports from the FBI
IG and the CIA IG, which have provided the news media and Congress
fodder for criticism, further investigation and closer surveillance of
these agencies, journalists have an array of tools institutionalized
within and outside government that, in 1920, Lippmann could only have
dreamed of.
Journalism today has many of the allies Lippmann longed for.
Congress has some of the independent assistance he hoped it would gain
in struggling against the executive's informational advantage--the
Congressional Budget Office, the Governmental Accountability Office and
the inspectors general. In "A Test of the News," Lippmann even applauded
interest groups (citing the Interchurch World Movement and the Popular
Government League) for their reports on media coverage of topics of
special concern to them. In these instances Lippmann heralded the
emergence of "a powerful engine of criticism...appearing in the
community which will no longer naively accept the current news on
contentious questions." He may as well have been talking about the
blogosphere.
How effective are the accounting and monitorial agencies inside
the government? How valuable are the various partisan and nonpartisan
nongovernmental watchdogs and think tanks that have proliferated since
the 1960s? How useful have universities been in attending to questions
of public policy? (Lippmann thought they could help only by getting away
from thinking that "terminates in doctor's theses and brown
quarterlies.") Can the media give the best of these political
observatories greater attention? Can Congress? Or are there so many
political observatories across the landscape now that they no longer
illuminate the night sky but block it by the lights of their own
self-advertisement?
This is where an inquiry in the spirit of Walter Lippmann should
begin--by evaluating whether the reforms he prescribed, all of which
have come to pass, have improved the press as he thought they would. If
journalism remains as bad as ever despite the emergence of numerous
skillful and bold political observatories, then Lippmann's reform
agenda, and probably his analysis, is proven wrong. On the other hand,
if the flaws Lippmann saw in journalism have been corrected by the
reforms he proposed and journalism still failed to give due warning that
deliberate lies, executive hubris and an administration's unembarrassed
disregard for veracity were leading the United States into a blunder of
gigantic proportion, then Liberty and the News mistakes the
location of the crisis of democracy.
I favor this second view, for in the end Liberty and the
News is naïve. It expresses astonishing faith in the notion
that if objective fact is protected and honestly communicated to the
general public, democracy will work because decisions will be based on
public understandings anchored in fair media renderings of reality. This
simplifies the informational requirements of democratic governance
beyond recognition. It gives no place to the micropolitics of
communication--to a leadership driven by ambitions or by fears it is
unable or unwilling to communicate honestly to the public or to put on
the table to Congress for discussion and revision; to an executive
branch cowed into deference by a bullying White House; to the strong
inclination of citizens to mold perception of facts (did we find WMDs in
Iraq? did Osama bin Laden conspire with Saddam on the 9/11 attacks?) to
their political preferences; and to the polarization of party politics
so that a conservative evangelical base is all but unwavering in support
of a conservative born-again President while independents and moderates
are confused and divided.
pretends to understand any of this. True, much of our best journalism
failed us--and when it did not, there were not sufficiently strong
forces to take up the facts and force their full consideration.
Journalistic failure is not independent of failures of other
institutions with an obligation to speak truth to power, and to speak it
again if no one listens the first time: the opposition (especially
Democrats in Congress), intelligence and military officers who believe
the President is making a mistake, university scholars who sometimes
support military interventions and so may have credibility in opposing
the intervention at hand. Yes, some individuals said the sky was
falling, but most of us had heard that before, and did not see the sky
fall, and we had few resources for recognizing it when it
did.
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