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- Volume 18, Issue 2, 2022
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion at 100, Sept 2022
Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion at 100, Sept 2022
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Lippmann and his critics: A new historical perspective of the context of Public Opinion’s press analysis
By John HamanThe education of Walter Lippmann on the topics of propaganda and censorship during the First World War profoundly shaped the sober critique of the traditional theory of American democracy that appeared in Public Opinion. The war also shook his faith in the ability of the press to inform a public he increasingly viewed as hopelessly separated from ‘reality’. Yet, between the end of the war and the publication of Public Opinion, Lippmann still maintained a faith, tempered by critique, in the potential of the press in his lesser-known publications, Liberty and the News and A Test of the News. This article argues that there was an overlooked yet critical influence on Lippmann in the interregnum between the end of the war and the publication of Public Opinion that helps explain Lippmann’s evolving thoughts on the press; namely, the critical responses to Liberty and the News and A Test of the News. This analysis suggests that the dialogue between Lippmann and his critics provides a piece of the intellectual and historical context for the arguments relating to the press that appeared in Public Opinion.
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Cruelty and democracy: Understanding Lippmann’s gambit
More LessA paradox haunts Lippmann’s critique of democracy running through his early work in Public Opinion up through The Public Philosophy. Liberal democracies, despite their claim to securing space for human dignity and freedom, can be sites of incredible cruelty. From the racial prejudices cutting through American politics, to the way Americans treated adversaries during war, democracy appeared to do little to vitiate the human propensity to inflict suffering upon others. This article examines Lippmann’s understanding of cruelty as a recurring feature of democracy and how he grappled with the question of how to curb the democratic public’s worst impulses. I argue that while Lippmann offers an expansive understanding of cruelty his analysis continually gravitates towards the role of cruelty in democracy and how the existence of mobs and demagogues represent democracy’s ever-latent potential for cruelty. Exploring his thinking further, I suggest there are at least two distinct views on the origins and dynamics of cruelty in his work – what I designate ‘callous’ and ‘joyful’ cruelty – influenced by James and Freud respectively. Finally, I contend that recognizing the gravity Lippmann assigns to the problem of cruelty is important because it can help us understand his puzzling turn to natural law in The Public Philosophy. Here I suggest Lippmann’s turn to natural law should be read as a radical pragmatist gambit in which the myth of natural law is mobilized to create a ‘tradition of civility’ aimed at curbing democratic cruelty. When we attend to this side of Lippmann we see a version of him that is less a conservative reactionary and more an anxious critic desperate to ward off the darker impulses of democracy.
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Lippmann’s triangular relationship on the crime scene: Pseudo-environments convicting the innocent
By Robin BlomLippmann noted that analyses of public opinion must start ‘by recognizing the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action’. This is certainly the case for crime scenes. The majority of the public will never be a victim of serious crime, and many people will not have close contact with law enforcement and the court system. Hence, much of what is learnt about crime is from exposure to news reports and depictions in popular media. Lippmann noted that crime is among the most important topics in terms of news output. Two case studies of persons who were initially convicted and later exonerated provide examples of how journalists report on eyewitness testimony when those eyewitness reports formed the main evidence for the prosecution. These case studies also provided opportunities to explore how pseudo-environments were developed by journalists to signify that the wrongfully convicted individuals were indeed guilty after such a jury verdict – without much, if any, reference to the possibility that those individuals were convicted based on witness misidentification.
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Lippmann–Ortega: On the role of elites in a democracy
More LessThe aim of this article is to contrast the understanding of elites by José Ortega y Gasset and Walter Lippmann. Although they both agreed in not seeing a conflict between elitism and democracy, they differed in three aspects. First, while for Lippmann the elites are the insiders, those who have privileged access to political information, for Ortega the elites are a phenomenon that has more to do with the moral and the psychological (those ‘egregious men’ who make an effort, who do not get carried away) and are not limited to the political sphere, but include other fields, such as culture or the arts. Second, they also differ in their conception of public opinion: whereas for Lippmann public opinion is the images that outsiders form from the stereotypes created by insiders, for Ortega public opinion is that which is held by everyone and by no one in particular, the well-known, the taken-for-granted. The third difference refers to the relationship between insiders and outsiders: while Lippmann fears the separation between pundits and the passive mass audience, the relationship between Ortega’s ‘egregious men’ and the ‘mass-men’ must be dynamic: the first must lead well, by example, the second must let themselves be guided.
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Parochialism, propaganda and Public Opinion: Reading Lippmann in Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism
More LessBy comparing the theoretical assessments of the effects of propaganda on liberal democratic discourse about the role of media in liberal democracy made by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion in 1922 and Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) nearly a century later, this historically grounded article considers the two critics’ analyses of the threat posed by propaganda to the reproduction of free speech in a liberal democracy. The cross-century comparison of their respective critiques of media demonstrates the relevance of Lippmann’s ‘stereotype’ and his frustrated, but still useful, three-part dynamic of public opinion: journalism, the public and the government. For both scholars, the rehabilitation of the public ‘un-commons’ from domination by state and corporate-driven propaganda is paramount.
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- Book Reviews
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Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History, Andie Tucher (2022)
By John NeroneReview of: Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History, Andie Tucher (2022)
New York: Columbia University Press, 384 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-23118-635-3, p/bk, $28.00
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The Language(s) of Politics: Multilingual Policy-Making in the European Union, Nils Ringe (2022)
Authors: Arman Basurto and Marta Domínguez-JiménezReview of: The Language(s) of Politics: Multilingual Policy-Making in the European Union, Nils Ringe (2022)
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 264 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-47205-513-5, p/bk, $34.95
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Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism, Pablo Calvi (2019)
More LessReview of: Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism, Pablo Calvi (2019)
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 276 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-82294-565-9, p/bk, $50
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2023)
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Volume 18 (2022)
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Volume 17 (2021)
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Volume 16 (2020)
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Volume 15 (2019)
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Volume 14 (2018)
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Volume 13 (2017)
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Volume 12 (2016)
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Volume 11 (2015)
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Volume 10 (2014)
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Volume 9 (2013)
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Volume 8 (2012)
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Volume 7 (2011)
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Volume 6 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 5 (2009)
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Volume 4 (2008)
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Volume 3 (2007)
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Volume 2 (2006 - 2007)
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Volume 1 (2005)