The article is here; the introduction:
In the final months of 1919, a year in which a pandemic had killed hundreds of thousands of people and the nation’s cities had been ravaged by racial pogroms and mass violence, Walter Lippmann reflected on the state of the American public sphere. “[A] nation,” he complained, “easily behaves like a mob. Under the influence of newspaper headlines and a panicked press, the contagion of unreason can easily spread through a stable community.” The press was awash in fiction and propaganda; Americans had “ceased[d] respond to truths and simply respond to opinions.” There wasn’t even a way to make sure people weren’t deliberately and cynically lying to the public: “[If] I lie to a million readers on an issue involving war and peace, I can lie my heart out and, if I choose the right set of lies, be completely irresponsible.” The audience was not acting in response to its objective social reality, but to what Lippmann called a “pseudo-environment of reports, rumors and conjecture.” How, he wondered, could democracy function in such an environment?
In the years to come, as he sought to answer this question, Lippmann produced a series of books that constitute perhaps the most serious effort to think about the problems, possibilities, and limits of public opinion in modern American democracy. In particular, she developed two key insights into democratic theory that can help us today, as another generation of Americans looks at their own public sphere – inundated with fake news, rumors, and cynical lies – with contempt and despair.
The first was the rejection of what he called the myth of the “omnicompetent citizen”. Americans, Lippmann argued, cling to the “intolerable and impracticable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion on all public affairs.” It simply wasn’t possible. American society was too complex, too vast, too differentiated. Divisions of labor were too deep, social life too confusing: a kaleidoscope of changing experiences. And the pace and scope of political life, flowing from crisis to crisis, from issue to issue, have made it impossible for citizens to catch their breath. How can anyone be expected, in the spare moments between work, leisure and family, to arrive at a thoughtful understanding of international trade policy one night, a workers’ strike the next night, and a public health scandal the next?
Inevitably, Lippmann points out, the individual must rely on others to help him make sense of what is happening, he must form his own opinions in a social and political environment. Yet no one really grappled with what this meant for the functioning of democracy because people continued to assume that opinions were formed and expressed by self-sufficient individuals. The result has been a tendency to think of problems of public opinion as a problem of individual rights, of norms and prohibitions that affect the way in which individuals exchange their ideas. And this meant that “Democrats treated the problem of forming public opinions as a problem of civil liberties.” They focused on debating whether or not individuals had the right to express certain ideas, under the assumption that public opinion would emerge from a marketplace of competing arguments.
But in his second important insight, Lippmann pointed out that this was a completely wrong way of thinking about the problem of public opinion. Arguing about the “privileges and immunities of opinions,” he explained, “we missed the point and tried to make bricks without straw.” What really mattered to him was the “news flow” on which opinions were based. “By following public opinion with respect to the information it exploits, and making the validity of news our ideal, we will fight the battle where it is actually fought.” This meant thinking not about what an individual believed or said, nor even about what rights any class of political expression should be afforded, but to think about how society, as a whole, was organizing the political economy of its information.
In this essay, I want to use these two points as a guide for thinking about how best to address contemporary crises in the American public sphere. Our concerns about the spread of fake news – of lies about stolen elections, harmful vaccines, and deep state conspiracies – continue to take the form of concerns about how particular forms of expressive (mis)conduct influence the (in)competence of individuals citizens. . As a result, the most commonly proposed remedies – particularly the temptation to regulate lies – focus on the privileges and immunities of opinion. In short, by seeing fake news as an illegitimate cancerous growth, we seek to eliminate it from the body politic.
Drawing on Lippmann’s analysis, I will argue that this is the wrong way to think about the real problems of American democratic life. The argument will take place in three parts. In the first part, inspired by Lippmann’s recollection that lying has been a problem for over a century, I compare the lies of a conservative political faction in the present moment with the lies of their forebears in the era of McCarthy and the Mass Resistance. The success of angry, conspiratorial and racist lies even in the very different media environment of the post-World War II “golden era”, I suggest, helps us to identify the lies of the present moment not as an unprecedented epistemic crisis, but as an expression of a conservative political formation in American political life.
In the second part, I argue that this political formation is benefiting from a broader crisis in the US information economy. Drawing on Lippmann’s distinction between “news flow” and the politics of expression, I show that the collapse of journalism as a profession has led to the underproduction of information in the political system and fostered the politics of outrageous expression – both of which have benefited the conservative political party in its effort to win elections by lying. Having developed this understanding of the contemporary problem, part three considers solutions to the current epidemic of lying.
Following Lippmann’s 1919 reform suggestions, it is argued that the key task is a broader policy of democratic revitalization, which will include new efforts to improve the “flow of news” by encouraging the production of information in new institutions dedicated to that task. Such reform efforts should be contrasted with efforts to address lies by seeking to eradicate or counter them directly in discourse, whether through censorship, civic education, or imposed counterspeech. By focusing on the politics of opinion rather than information, reform efforts centered on speech and speech law risk exacerbating, rather than ameliorating, the crisis of American democracy.