Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann, 1921, Excerpts
Crystallizing the Common Will
The living impressions of a large number of people are to an immeasurable degree personal in each of them, and unmanageably complex in the mass. How do great numbers of people feeling each so privately about so abstract a picture, develop any common will? How does a simple and constant idea emerge from this complex of variables? How are those things known as the Will of the People, or the National Purpose, or Public Opinion crystallized?
There are no end of things which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and indirectly perceived, and where the objective is likewise indirect. They invoke a collective soul, a national mind, a spirit of the age which imposes order upon random opinion.
Public opinion constituted out of divergent opinions is clouded; its meaning approaches the neutral tint formed out of the blending of many colors. Where superficial harmony is the aim and conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual result. Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is a symptom of cross-purposes.
People differ widely in their susceptibility to ideas. There are some in whom the idea of a starving child in
For you can associate an emotion, say fear, first with something immediately dangerous, then with something similar to that idea, and so on and on.
Manufacturing Consent
The manufacture of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than of rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.
The processes by which public opinions arise and the opportunities for manipulation are open to anyone who understands the process. When a number of people all say Yes, it becomes represented publicly by a number of symbolic phrases which carry the individual emotion after evacuating most of the intention.
If the established powers are sensitive and well-informed, if they are visibly trying to meet popular feeling and are actually removing some of the causes of dissatisfaction, they have little to fear. It takes stupendous and persistent blundering, plus almost infinite tactlessness, to start a revolution from below.
Public Relations and the Press
To most of the big topics of news, the facts are not simple, and not at all obvious. News and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.
The picture which the publicity man makes for the reporter is the one he wishes the public to see. He is censor and propagandist, responsible to the whole truth only as it accords with his employers’ own interests. The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of modern life do not spontaneously take a shape. They are given shape by somebody. Thus the ostensible leader often finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor.
So if the publicity man wishes free publicity he has to start something. He arranges a stunt; obstructs the traffic, teases the police, somehow manages to entangle his client or his cause with an event that is already news.
Propaganda
But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another? In describing the present you are more or less tied down to common experience. The skillful propagandist knows that you must start with a plausible analysis and then stoke up energy by brandishing a passport to heaven.
