I kept finding myself thinking that this book is about the most direct precursor to the career of Neil Postman and other political commentators (Postman being political, but mostly writing about media and technology and education) that I could otherwise imagine. There’s a part of me that didn’t really know what I was heading into with this book and had kind of managed to expect a kind of HL Mencken type book, and maybe that’s because I was layering Walter Lippmann with Walter Winchell, and because the audiobook reader of this book sounded enough like Keith Olberman to make me think of Mencken.
But instead of Mencken, we get someone more akin to later political commentators and thinkers like Richard Hofstadter. This book is not a criticism of mass culture, public opinion, the media, and propaganda, but instead a very clearly articulated expository examination of those ideas. It’s a breakthrough book because so much of what you read in this book is not only still true to today (with necessary changes because of technology — Lippmann is writing this before tv and more or less before radio). He begins with an image of a group citizens from various nations sitting around a parlor not knowing that WWI has just erupted and in the absence of news from that front, they do not know yet they are enemies. And for some amount of time, there’s a gap between the actual events and the knowledge where they find themselves. He uses this to sort of explain the basic concept of his whole book, about how people form opinions on news, politics, war, etc out of nothing, what influences those decisions, what can influence those decisions, and how that process works within individuals and what it says about them. The book then is primarily a discussion of multiple venues of opinion such as politics, the media (specifically newspapers), local versus national and international idea, political parties etc. I won’t get into all the different spaces, but there’s a lot of very clear insight here, and he addresses that the overflow of information because of mass media (which will only get more massive) how created the need, the responsibility, and the inevitability of needing principles guiding how these decisions are made or else they will be manipulated. We know, and he knows, it will manipulated of course. |
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/920442.Public_Opinion)