When I become bogged down in the flood of empirical research about public opinion – across academic fields and in our newspapers – I often look back to the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century classic texts about the nature of public opinion. There I know I will find clarity of vision, strong normative guidance, and, best of all, a reminder of why it is we spend so much time struggling with the measurement of public preferences. Among the most insightful thinkers on the subject of American public opinion are, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gabriel Tarde, James Bryce, and the above-quoted John Dewey.

But of all these brilliant writers, it is Walter Lippmann who is the most troubling and the most relevant for us at century's close. It was Lippmann who foresaw two of the most challenging, intertwined problems of democratic practice in a mass society: the absence of the omnicompetent citizen and the inability of the news media to help citizens achieve minimal competence.

For decades we have believed that the information revolution – the expansion of the mass media into all aspects of our lives – would enable common folks to rise to the ideal-typical behavior and knowledge levels expected of them in democratic theories. Yet with each passing decade we realize just how far American democracy is from the imagined democracies of our founders, and it was the skeptical and erudite Lippmann who first (and most eloquently) brought us the bad news.

Lippmann's central arguments in his 1922 Public Opinion (1960) – his masterwork – are well known. It is a dense book, hard for undergraduates to penetrate, but full of provocations and subtlety. Let me focus, for this essay, on three of Lippmann's most powerful claims to see how scholars view these arguments today – whether we have strong evidence for them or not, where Lippmann was right, and where he was overly pessimistic.

This is an easy exercise for me: In 1999, I have the advantage of more than seven decades of data on media and politics, which Lippmann did not have. Lippmann lived a long life, dying in 1974 at the age of eighty-five, and it was a life devoted to public service and the critique of political institutions. But the recent growth of the academic disciplines – particularly psychology, sociology, and political science – give us even more to meditate on with regard to public opinion. Three of Lippmann's arguments are of interest here:

Let us take these arguments in order, recognizing their interconnectivity, and ponder them in the light of the late twentieth century.

The Problematic Citizen

“[In the eighteenth century, when our founders wrote,] not only was the individual citizen fitted to deal with all public affairs, but he was consistently public-spirited and endowed with unflagging interest .... Since everybody was assumed to be interested enough in important affairs, only those affairs came to seem important in which everybody was interested” (Lippmann 1960:173).

Lippmann recognized that the insights of our founders, their confidence in the citizenry in particular, were based on a small, “self-contained” community. In such communities, people ran see things for themselves because nothing is far away: Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and it is possible to attain some intellectual mastery of one's local environment.

But this model, as Lippmann underscored, was no longer relevant in the twentieth century in a highly urban and industrialized society. The sheer number of issues facing Americans, domestic and foreign, makes it impossible to achieve mastery of one's environment these days, even with constant exposure to the mass media. Lippmann developed his critique of the omnicompetent citizen even further in The Phantom Public (1925), published a few years after Public Opinion. There he argued that public affairs are quite mysterious to the average citizen, torn as he or she is among citizenship, family, work, and other demands. As Lippmann put it, the citizen “reigns in theory, but does not govern” (1925:13).

The omnicompetent or highly engaged citizen of democratic theory was not a straw man that Lippmann used to gain rhetorical power. It is true that such a citizen – deeply involved in all political debates of the day, willing to participate in social movements, and fully informed before voting in all elections – is an ideal type. But it is an ideal type that appears so frequently in democratic writings that Lippmann was forced to confront it.

Theorists who came before Lippmann were not naive: Even the ancient Greek thinkers, Plato in particular, doubted citizen competence in the realm of politics. But consistent with American exceptionalism, our founders, and other great men who followed them to take leadership roles in nineteenth-century politics, thought America might be different: Our nation's citizens could very well fit the template of extraordinary capability and knowledge in all areas of public life. America would be the site of intense political participation and high voter turnout across regions and ethnic enclaves, many leading statesmen believed.

Lippmann may have embarked on the critique of the omnicompetent citizen early in the century, but others came along shortly thereafter with equally damning indictments (Converse 1964; Schumpeter 1950). Most recently, we have the comprehensive study by Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter documenting the low knowledge levels among the public (1996).

And as Donald Kinder has pointed out, the picture is probably even worse than we think, since many politically ignorant citizens are not even surveyed, due to climbing nonresponse rates (1998). Although there is variation in knowledge levels across social groups, the overall picture is a bit grim. Basic knowledge about our institutions, policies, and individual leaders makes up the building blocks for political cognition, doesn't it? Since Lippmann wrote, there have been several challenges to this view.

The first challenge is from scholars who argue for “heuristics” or “low information rationality” (Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Popkin 1991). These scholars – through the use of experimentation and surveying – argue that citizens don't need to know much at all about the political system as long as they have a general sense of whom to listen to on policy matters. Perhaps, they argue, it is enough to know that you are a Democrat.

When complex matters of policy arise, the partisan Democrat simply turns to that party and its leadership for guidance. In other words, citizens do not need to know much about the issues as long as they have a good sense of who is on their side – which party or which leader shares their interests and preferences. This paradigm, while comforting in some regards, skirts the central issues that Lippmann raised.

Besides the fact that it is difficult for the uninformed to even know which leaders to take cues from and the fact that elites do not always create the best policy options, the minimally informed citizen is hardly a person to applaud. Democratic citizenship is not solely about preferences between options. Competence in citizenship is about dialogue with others, refining and developing one's ideological framework, and awareness of an issue debate from the start of that debate.

Lippmann was not so far off from the low information rationality model. After all, his solution to the low knowledge levels among citizens was to turn to leadership – to bureaus of experts who might explore and decide policy for us. Yet the low information, rationality framework is basically unsatisfying because it hones citizenship down to such a small role (taking cues, voting) that it lessens the notion of democratic competence. Sure, we can all take cues, but that is hardly the kind of democratic engagement we hope for and need in a strong democracy.

Another answer to Lippmann's questions about citizen competence might be found in the statistical act of aggregation: Perhaps people are uninformed or even misinformed, but taken as a whole, by summing their preferences, we discover a rationality of sorts (e.g., Page and Shapiro 1992). If we aggregate, the argument goes, weak opinions cancel each other out, and the strong, informed opinions triumph.

Evidence for this hypothesis, however, focuses on stability of public opinion over time and avoids concerns about individual political knowledge and socialization. In general, this approach does not get at the varied and intense engagement that Lippmann seeks in the citizenry, since it also reduces expectations of competence to the bare minimum. The view that citizens are knowledgeable enough, despite their wide areas of ignorance, is exactly the sort of argument that Lippmann would have found regretfully misguided.

Stereotypical Thinking and How to Challenge It

There is now overwhelming evidence from social psychology documenting the importance of stereotyping as a fundamental dimension of human cognition (Fiske 1998). In particular, psychologists have focused on gender, race, and age as categories that people use to judge others. So Lippmann was, as on other topics, ahead of his time in outlining the value of this particular cognitive phenomenon. Yet the stereotyping research is now very sophisticated and multifaceted. One interesting area of inquiry has focused on whether people can control their biases – particularly the judgments they make almost “automatically” on seeing a woman, a black person, or an elderly individual. Susan Fiske's comprehensive and thoughtful summary of the stereotyping literature leads her to this conclusion about information processing:

The bad news is that people's habitual use of subjectively diagnostic information, certain information configurations, and perceived covariation sustains stereotypes. Various motivations, which safeguard ingroup membership, exacerbate stereotyping of outgroups and favor the ingroup. Happy, angry, and anxious moods all encourage stereotyping. The good news is that people can sometimes control even apparently automatic biases, if appropriately motivated, given the right kind of information, and in the right mood. People therefore can make the hard choice. (Fiske 1998:391)

The current view from psychology, then, is far more optimistic than Lippmann's view of stereotypes: He believed that these mental categories inevitably and chronically prevented proper information processing and reasoning. These days, the evidence shows Lippmann to be correct in emphasizing the importance of these cognitive categories but provides some hope as well. In particular, we should be encouraged by Fiske's point about information: that when given the “right kind of information” people can control their tendency to rely on stereotypes. Journalists, it is safe to say, can be the source of this information. They, too, sustain stereotypes, unfortunately, but if they are conscious of the problem and intent on battling it, they can do a great service to citizens in helping them to part with their stereotypes.

And that brings us to Lippmann's last argument. that journalists cannot be held responsible for educating us, that their powers are limited. This is an ironic argument because it comes from one of the most pedagogically oriented and most influential journalists in American history. Nonetheless, Lippmann's point is well taken: Reporters are limited in their ability to shed light on events because they are human and subject to the same biases in perception as the rest of us. Yes, journalists know more of the world than the rest of us. They travel and talk about public affairs constantly. Yet they cannot escape the subjectivity that biases human cognition. News and truth, as Lippmann puts it, are not synonymous, and to believe that they are is to ignore basic limitations of human perception.

Among the many interesting points that Lippmann makes when trying to distinguish news and truth are his arguments about the problems of agency. Lippmann notes that journalists may have extraordinary ability and confidence, but in the end, they know better than anyone else the impossibilities of objective perception. Journalism is “frail” Lippmann argues, “too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the truth which democrats hoped was inborn” (1960:228). Reporters may be courageous and of high integrity, but they can never assume the responsibilities we often ask them to take up – as objective and evenhanded surveyors of the political scene.  I personally find this part of Lippmann's brilliant corpus to be the most troubling because it leaves us without surveillance: If we cannot rely on journalists to “bring us the world” as they themselves often put it, on whom can we rely?  There is no easy answer to this question, and Lippmann himself is not particularly convincing in his solutions: his bureaus of experts who comb the world for information, making good decisions for the rest of us.

To my mind, Lippmann lets journalists off the hook too easily. It is true that journalists, even if they try hard to achieve objectivity and try to teach us about policy and public affairs in the best ways they know how, will never drag citizens up to the level of competence celebrated in classical democratic theory.  Journalists cannot create omnicompetent citizens unless citizens themselves strive for this sort of knowledge and engagement. But, as we have often seen in the pages of this journal, journalists can maintain the struggle to find a new paradigm for their craft.

If true objectivity and evenhandedness are – as Lippmann correctly notes – beyond our grasp, we must develop other approaches to journalism that do enhance democratic dialogue and policy making. Proposals for the future of journalism swirl around in academic circles, and Lippmann – if he were alive today – would applaud self-reflection and self-critique among journalists. We could use a bit more of it, in fact.  Political scientists still read Lippmann, Dewey, Tocqueville, and other theorists of public opinion communication. But practicing journalists – the men and women who struggle with stereotyping and the burdens of objectivity on a daily basis – might find new motivation for studying their own craft if they took a few days off to read and reflect on the ideas in Public Opinion.

Note

1. Cited in Steel (1981:183). This is the premier biography of Lippmann and well worth reading.

References

www.pseudology.org