The public opinion

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First edition

The public opinion (English original title Public Opinion ) is a monograph by Walter Lippmann from 1922. It criticizes the participatory model of modern democracy and analyzes the ambivalent role of mass communication in the generation of public opinion . Lippmann advocates the control of public opinion by an intellectual elite in the "general interest", for the common good in the sense of the reason of state .

As Lippmann in the introduction , the outside world and the images in the mind performs (see pp. 3-21 of the English edition), behind the political orientation of most people subjective , irrational and self-interest led perspective perceptions and mental imagery that the complex Do not do justice to reality, but create a simplified “pseudo-environment”. The cognitive limitations lead to the fact that this worldview is formed with the help of stereotypes , symbols or clichés conveyed and reinforced by the media , which Lippmann describes in detail.

Walter Lippmann 1905

Lippmann closes his introduction with a summary of the main statements of his work (p. 31f.):

The substance of the argument is that democracy in its original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside. (...) My conclusion is that they (the English socialists) ignore the difficulties, as completely as did the original democrats, because they, too, assume, and in a much more complicated civilization, that somehow mysteriously there exists in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach. This organization (of public opinions) I conceive to be in the first instance the task of a political science that has won its proper place as formulator, in advance of real decision, instead of apologist, critic, or reporter after the decision has been made . I try to indicate that the perplexities of government and industry are conspiring to give political science this enormous opportunity to enrich itself and to serve the public. And, of course, I hope that these pages will help a few people to realize that opportunity more vividly, and therefore to pursue it more consciously.

Public opinion has become a foundational text for media studies , political science, and social psychology . It is considered the most original and valuable book by Lippmann. In 1997 it appeared in a new edition with a foreword by his biographer Ronald Steel.

A German translation of the book was published for the first time under the title Public Opinion in translation by Hermann Reidt in 1964 by Rütten & Loening in Munich. This translation was reprinted in 2018 by Westend Verlag with a detailed foreword;

The work The Phantom Public ("The Public as Phantom") from 1925 is considered a continuation of the work "Public Opinion".

Lippmann's influence is particularly evident in Edward Bernays ' work Crystallizing Public Opinion .

construction

Lippmann dedicates the book to his wife Faye and precedes it with a quote from Plato's allegory of the cave .

The original 427-page book consists of eight parts with a total of 28 individual chapters. The first five parts of the book represent the descriptive part, the sixth part contains an analysis of traditional and modern democratic theories, the seventh presents Lippmann's analysis of the media, more precisely the press, in the eighth and last part Lippmann presents his counter-draft of an organized public opinion the center point.

The second part after the introduction presents the limitations of people in access to knowledge and facts: censorship, secrecy, time, language, education, origin, income, interest hinder the search for true reality. Then there is the darkness and complexity of the facts as such.

Parts three and four examine different stereotypes, self-interest, morals, social philosophies, political advertising, and their effect on the perception of the outside world. Selection and creative interpretation lead to simplified subjective ideas that are inserted into the worldview of the individual.

Part five examines how many individual opinions can form a collective image, that of public opinions. Lippmann's idea is that there is a hierarchy of symbols. At the top are highly emotional, very general and vague symbols that only allow approval or rejection. People do not orient themselves by the truth of ideas, but by which authority appears trustworthy in dealing with general symbolism. For Lippmann, the symbol is a mechanism of solidarity and exploitation.

In the sixth part, Lippmann examines the traditional (Greek) and modern (in his view socialist) theories of democracy. Modern theories in particular fail because societies are too complex and individuals, being centered on self-interest, are not in a position to take in reality unfiltered and to orientate themselves towards a general interest. The press is also unable to compensate for these deficits, but strengthens the citizens' view of the world instead of enlightening them. Therefore, a minority of experts must organize government advice, citizen education and public consensus building.

Creation of a "pseudo-environment"

The main idea behind Lippmann's portrayal is to distinguish between actual reality, expert knowledge of this reality and the natural subjective illusory world in which most people live, from the pseudo-environment created by public opinion with the help of the media, in his day above all the Press, is generated. “The real environment is too big, too complex and too fluid to be directly accessible to people.” Therefore, a constructed pseudo-environment develops in people, which represents a subjective, biased and simplified picture of the world. To a certain extent, in Lippmann's view, everyone's worldview is necessarily such a fiction. People live "in the same world, but they think and feel in different worlds."

The artificial and fictional notion of the world determines the real behavior of people in the real world. Lippmann shows the most important interrelationships and dependencies between the psychology of the individual, the environment and the media.

Media reports and truth

The relevant facts are never presented completely and precisely as part of the big picture, but are often selected and compiled in such a way that they express a subjective interpretation of an event. Often it is precisely those who know the real and true environment who construct a deceptive illusory world in the public sphere in order to promote their special interests.

Propaganda is only made possible by the fact that there is a break between the event of reality and public opinion, a barrier at which the censorship of the “ bouncer ” can take effect. As a result, the means of mass communication, as a means of transferring information and valuation, are fundamentally characterized by manipulability .

According to Lippmann, the blame for the perspective shift in images of reality is not to be found in the technical side of the media, but in the low intellectual sympathy and willingness of members of society to appreciate reality as such. This leads to the following phenomena:

  1. Since news is a commodity , the public has to pay a price for the media-conveyed understanding of the unperceived reality. Lippmann sees a certain irony in the fact that people should also pay for the public opinion they are supposed to internalize themselves. People are selective in their buying behavior and buy media at the lowest possible price. The media fulfill two functions: to convey information and interpretation on public affairs and thus to make a profit in order to be able to survive against the competition in the media market.
  2. Messages are processed so that they can be approved: Opinions are published in a form that has been confirmed several times, so that they appear less controversial after this confirmation process. Official representations of political affairs are sold as reputable news, the unofficial ones as "private". These are hardly taken into account or serve as eye-catching “controversial topics” for disguised propaganda purposes.
  3. News has a signal value : make messages to an event attentive, this attention control but is the result of selection and reduction ( agenda setting ) as the interpretation , evaluation and classification ( framing ) of the message by the publisher or owner of the news: the journalism produced and spreads the seeds (news) from which public opinion then grows.

Establishing a consensus

When used correctly in the interest of the public, the creation of a unified opinion is useful and even necessary for the cohesion of society, since in many cases it is only after a careful analysis and the data that it can be determined where the real “general interest” lies. But most people are neither capable nor willing to make this intellectual effort. Therefore, the world has to be prepared for most people by the well-informed so that they can act according to this interpretation of the world.

Only the political elite are able to understand the complexities of reality to a higher and appropriate degree. Lippmann therefore suggests that a “specialized group of people” submit their findings to the decision-makers. These in turn have mastered the "art of persuasion" in order to convey to the public the decisions that affect them and make them appear acceptable.

Public Opinion argues that the increased power of propaganda and the specialized knowledge that has become necessary for political decision-making has rendered the traditional notion of democracy meaningless.

reception

Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman took over the expression "manufacturing consent" in 1988 for the title of their media-critical work Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (German: The Consensus Factory: On the Political Economy of the Mass Media ). Chomsky accuses Lippmann's "audience democracy" of obscuring the actual balance of power.

(...) a decisive prerequisite (is) present (...), but (is) not expressed (...): The specialists only get to the decision-making levers of power by - what they do in front of themselves must hide - serve the really powerful, the owners of society, a very small group of people. (...) But that has to be kept under the covers, and that is why the specialists are drummed into the convictions and doctrines with which they can serve the interests of private power. Thus there is an educational system in which the future specialists adopt the values ​​and interests of the private sector and the state economic sector that represents them, while the confused herd simply has to be distracted and kept away from the meatpots of power.

Lippmann's conclusions were questioned by John Dewey , which led to what is known as the Dewey-Lippmann controversy .

Lippmann's idea of ​​the pseudo-environment is compared to Luhmann's concept of complexity reduction .

The idea of ​​the effects of fictitious ideas of reality on the real world was later formulated and worked out as Thomas theorem : "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ Walter Lippmann: 1922 ( Public Opinion  - Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Benjamin F. Wright: Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann . University of Texas Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4773-0531-7 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  3. ^ Ronald Steel: Walter Lippmann and the American Century . Routledge, 2017, ISBN 978-1-351-29975-6 , pp. 172 ff . ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  4. ^ Andreas M. Wüst: Politbarometer . Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-11058-3 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Auxiliary translation: The essential content of my argument is that democracy in its original form (in Athens, AdV) never faced the problem I described, which results from the non-conformity of the outside world with the image in people's heads. (...) I come to the conclusion that they (the English Socialists, AdV) misunderstand the difficulties just as the original Democrats do because they also accept, and in an incomparably more complicated civilization, that in the hearts of all people in a mysterious way a knowledge of the world exists beyond their reach.
  6. ↑ (auxiliary translation): I see the organization (of public opinion, AdV) primarily as the task of a political science that has its appropriate place in front of the decisions by finding formulations instead of reporting afterwards, justifying or criticizing to practice. I am trying to show that the political and economic confusions work together to provide political science with this tremendous opportunity to gain experience and serve the public. And of course I hope that these pages will encourage some people to see this opportunity more vividly and to use it more consciously.
  7. ^ Elliot King, Jane Chapman: Key Readings in Journalism . Routledge, 2012, ISBN 978-1-135-76767-9 ( com.ph [accessed August 29, 2019]).
  8. ^ Doris Appel Graber: The politics of news: the news of politics . CQ Press, 1998, ISBN 978-1-56802-412-7 ( com.ph [accessed August 29, 2019]).
  9. ^ John Durham Peters, Peter Simonson: Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts, 1919-1968 . Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7425-2839-0 ( com.ph [accessed August 29, 2019]).
  10. ^ John Gray Geer: Public Opinion and Polling Around the World: A Historical Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO, 2004, ISBN 978-1-57607-911-9 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  11. ^ Ronald Steel: Walter Lippmann and the American Century . Routledge, 2017, ISBN 978-1-351-29975-6 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  12. ^ Walter Lippmann: The public opinion. How it is created and manipulated . With an introduction by Walter Ötsch and Silja Graupe. Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-86489-223-3 ( westendverlag.de ).
  13. ↑ Vincent Price: Public Opinion . SAGE, 1992, ISBN 978-0-8039-4023-9 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  14. ^ Edward L. Bernays: Crystallizing Public Opinion . Open Road Media, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4976-9880-2 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019] see introduction by Stuart Ewen).
  15. ↑ Melvin L. DeFleur, Margaret H. DeFleur, Mass Communication Theories: Explaining Origins, Processes, and Effects . Routledge, 2016, ISBN 978-1-317-34658-6 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  16. ↑ Melvin L. DeFleur, Margaret H. DeFleur, Mass Communication Theories: Explaining Origins, Processes, and Effects . Routledge, 2016, ISBN 978-1-317-34658-6 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  17. ^ Chapter XV, Section 4: Leaders and the Rank and File.
  18. ^ Walter Lippmann: Noam Chomsky on Walter Lippmann. In: Walter Lippmann. August 3, 2015, Retrieved August 30, 2019 (American English).
  19. ↑ Noam Chomsky: Absolute Noam Chomsky . Orange Press, 2004, ISBN 978-3-936086-16-4 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  20. ↑ David Fott: John Dewey: America's Philosopher of Democracy . Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, ISBN 978-0-8476-8760-2 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  21. ↑ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1000304.pdf
  22. ^ Daniel Rölle, Petra Müller, Ulrich W. Steinbach: Politics and television: content analytical studies . Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-322-91482-8 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  23. ↑ Jasmin Top: Consensus Analysis: A New Instrument of Content Analysis: Theoretical Foundation and Empirical Calibration . BoD - Books on Demand, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8334-5290-1 ( com.ph [accessed August 30, 2019]).
  24. ↑ German for example "If people define situations as real, their consequences are real."

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