Directing the Herd

Long before academics and pundits began mourning the loss of the Habermasian public sphere, Walter Lippmann, America’s dean of journalism, questioned whether such a sphere had ever existed. Writing in the 1910s and 1920s, Lippmann argued that the very notion of a civic society capable of understanding and advocating for the common good was a fantasy. The public was a “phantom” and society a “bewildered herd,” with individuals too trapped in their subjective experience, too reliant on the distorted pictures of the world furnished by mass media and politicians, to govern themselves in any meaningful sense. Democracy couldn’t mean collective self-rule, according to Lippmann; it had to mean periodic ratification of decisions by experts who knew what was good for everyone else. Lippmann’s contempt for the masses would go on to underpin a certain way of organizing our society’s information environment: someone had to enact the “manufacture of consent.” The mass media did so, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky later outlined, through structural filters — concentrated ownership, reliance on official sources, the systematic privileging of elite perspectives — that ensured Lippmann’s favored sort of democracy flourished.