Essay: Journalism and its discontents
Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero.
by Sidney Blumenthal (Salon, 2007-10-25)
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.
Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")
Among his varied roles, Lippmann was the original and most prescient analyst of the modern media. His disillusioning experience in World War I prompted the first of three books on the subject, "Liberty and the News," followed in rapid succession by "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public." In them Lippmann deconstructed the distortions and lies of government propaganda eagerly transmitted by a jingoist press corps, the "manufacture of consent" and the creation of "stereotypes" projected as false reality.
-- from the afterword to a new edition of Walter Lippman's "Liberty and the News" to be reissued this month by Princeton University Press.
The rest of the story: Salon
by Sidney Blumenthal (Salon, 2007-10-25)
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.
Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")
Among his varied roles, Lippmann was the original and most prescient analyst of the modern media. His disillusioning experience in World War I prompted the first of three books on the subject, "Liberty and the News," followed in rapid succession by "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public." In them Lippmann deconstructed the distortions and lies of government propaganda eagerly transmitted by a jingoist press corps, the "manufacture of consent" and the creation of "stereotypes" projected as false reality.
-- from the afterword to a new edition of Walter Lippman's "Liberty and the News" to be reissued this month by Princeton University Press.
The rest of the story: Salon
Labels: accountability, corporate media, free press, journalism, news media, Sidney Blumenthal, Walter Lippman
posted by John Gabree at 1:27 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home