Walter Lippmann

Lippmann is the most useful source in this project because he is not a critic. He is an insider describing the job, approvingly, in print, in 1922.

The environment is too large and complex to know directly, so people act on stereotypes, the pictures in their heads, and those pictures can be managed.

The argument

Nobody can experience national policy, a foreign war or an economy at first hand. What reaches you is a report, a photograph, a phrase, and you fill in the rest from what you already believe. Lippmann called those shortcuts stereotypes, and he meant it descriptively: they are how anyone copes with a world larger than their senses.

He coined the manufacture of consent for the work of shaping those pictures. His conclusion is the part people forget: since the public cannot govern competently on second-hand pictures, a specialized governing class should do the governing and manage opinion on its behalf.

Why that matters

Herman and Chomsky borrowed his phrase for a book arguing the opposite politics. The phrase is the same, the evaluation is inverted, and the underlying description of the mechanism is nearly identical. When the critic and the practitioner agree on how something works and disagree only about whether it is good, the description is probably right.

Serious objections

• The elitist conclusion does not follow from the epistemic premise. That people rely on simplifications is an argument for better information, not for a managing class.
• John Dewey's answer, made at the time, is that publics are formed by participation rather than by being informed at, and that Lippmann had described a symptom of exclusion as a fact about human capacity.
• The account of stereotypes is close to unfalsifiable in the form he gives it, and the experimental work on framing came much later.