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Public Opinion

I think the first person to grasp the unavoidability of political bias fully is the American journalist Walter Lippmann. In my vote for the most insightful paragraph ever written on the epistemological challenges confronted by citizens in large, complex, modern societies, he wrote,

“There is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion purged of desire,

Dan Williams • The deep and unavoidable roots of political bias

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

In his 1922 opus, Public Opinion, Lippmann poses a straightforward question: Can citizens achieve a basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices about what to do? If the answer is no, then the entire democratic project is at best a folly.

Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy

In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct exp

Nicholas Carr • Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists—he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do i

Peter Mitchell • Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

The key question for Lippmann wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently.

Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy

Lippmann looks beyond the ideal citizen of democratic theory—“sovereign and omnicompetent,” in his memorable phrase—to bring into focus the real person: time-strapped and distracted, biased, susceptible to resentment and sentimentality, bombarded with messages and images, overstretched, wavering between confusion and overconfidence.