Making News

Walter Lippmann, who thought as much as anyone about the role of the press in society, maintained a contrarian's view of the relationship between American journalism and the democracy it allegedly served. His outlook originated in his pessimistic view of what we commonly refer to as "the public good." In The Phantom Public, one of his earliest and most critical assessments, Lippmann railed against the "mystical fallacy of democracy; that the people, all of them, are competent" or could ever be made so.¹ Modernity moved too quickly, political choices were too complicated, the daily needs of life obtruded too much for the average individual ever to be sufficient to the political demands to which he or she was subjected. If an individual was not competent to judge the needs of the day, how could a collective ever be so? "The public does not know in most crises what specifically is the truth or justice of the case, and men are not agreed on what is beautiful and good," he asserted.² "The public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain," Lippmann wrote, voicing a Menckenian cynicism, "having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain."³

The "public," as an ethically informed and judicious body of citizens empowered to make reasonable choices among several courses of action, simply did not exist. Being made up of men and women in atomized self-interest, endlessly distracted, and imperfect of reason and knowledge, the public could have no common purpose. Members of the body politic could only ever be "spectators of action," not generators of it.⁴ There was no Rousseauian general will, there was only what Lippmann called "executive acts" around which a public might coalesce. "The work of the world is carried on by men in their executive capacity, by an infinite number of concrete acts, plowing and planting and reaping, building and destroying, fitting this to that, going from here to there, transforming A into B and moving B from X to Y." Issues are not settled by the "public"; the "public" merely provides an affirmation—typically via an election—which legitimizes an agent's executive action. "Executive action is not for the public," Lippmann wrote. "The public acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of some one in a position to act executively."⁵ For Lippmann, publics do not produce ideas or political action or policies; ideas, acts, and policies produce publics. What mattered was the ability to make a thing or present an idea around which a public could be galvanized.⁶ This "public" could never be anticipatory, it is always reactionary. Hence in Lippmann's skeptical vision the danger of unscrupulous executive actors mobilizing an irrational mob remained an ever-present danger in democratic society.⁷

Lippmann turned our normal way of thinking about democratic processes on its head: rather than a perdurable public, whose putative "interest" gave rise to proposed action, it was action that would give rise to contingent publics. If the public cannot be a generative force, then Lippmann's views carry enormous implications for our understanding of how news and journalism function in democratic society. The delivery of news, in Lippman's view, is itself a catalyzing force. News made the public(s) it ostensibly served, gathering a contingent public around itself. Most individuals are not well-informed, generally, and hence not already mobilized around an event or a crisis until it occurs. It is in the narrative making of events—in the reporting of news—that interested individuals become a "public." The enormous political power of executive-acting journalists becomes obvious. The public "is [only] aroused at evil made...