The article is here. Introduction:
In the final months of 1919, a year when hundreds of thousands of people died from the plague and American cities were ravaged by genocide and mob violence, Walter Lippmann reflected on the state of the American public sphere. “[A] “The nation easily behaves like a mob,” he complained. Under the influence of headlines and disturbing printed matter, the contagion of irrationality can easily spread throughout settled communities.” The press was flooded with fiction and propaganda, and Americans “had enough.”[d] “You're reacting to the truth, you're simply reacting to opinion.” There wasn't even a way to keep people from deliberately and cynically lying to the public.”[If] “I could lie to a million readers about issues related to war and peace, and keep my head down, and if I chose the right set of lies, it would be completely irresponsible.” The public acts without reacting to objective social reality. But Lippmann wondered how democracy could function in what he called a “pseudoenvironment of reports, rumors, and speculation.”
Over the next few years, Lippmann sought to answer this question, publishing a series of books that represent perhaps the most serious efforts to think deeply about the problems, possibilities, and limits of public opinion in modern American democracy. In particular, he developed two key insights into democratic theory that can serve us today, as other generations of Americans look with disdain and despair at a public sphere filled with fake news, rumors, and cynical lies.
The first was a rejection of what he called the myth of the “omnipotent citizen.” Lippmann argued that Americans cling to “the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us should have a competent opinion on all public affairs.” That was impossible. American society was too complex, vast, and differentiated. The division of labor was too deep, and social life too chaotic. It was a kaleidoscope of transformative experiences. And the speed and flow of political life, sliding from crisis to crisis and issue to issue, made it difficult for citizens to breathe. How can we expect, in our spare time between work, leisure, and family, to ponder international trade policy one night, understand a labor strike the next, and a public health scandal the next?
Inevitably, Lippmann noted, individuals must rely on others to help them understand what is happening and must form their own opinions in the social and political environment. But because people continued to assume that opinions were formed and expressed by self-sufficient individuals, no one really considered what this meant for the functioning of democracy. The result has been a tendency to think of the question of public opinion as a question of individual rights, that is, a question of regulations and prohibitions affecting the way in which individuals exchange their ideas. And that meant that “democrats have treated the question of forming public opinion as a matter of civil liberties.” They focused on arguing about whether individuals have the right to express certain ideas, assuming that public opinion would emerge from a marketplace of competing claims.
But in a second important insight, Lippmann points out that this is a completely wrong way to think about the issue of public opinion. He explained that by arguing about “privileges and immunities of opinion,” “we have missed the point and tried to make bricks without straw.” What really mattered was the “news flow” on which opinions were based. “By setting aside our opinions about the information it leverages and making the relevance of the news our ideal, we will be fighting the battle we are actually fighting.” This meant thinking not about what individuals believe or say, or even what rights should be granted to what kinds of political expression, but how society as a whole arranges its political economy of information.
In this essay, I want to use these two points as a guide to thinking about how best to navigate the current crisis in the American public sphere. Our anxiety about the spread of fake news (lies about stolen elections, harmful vaccines, deep state conspiracies) is a reflection of our anxiety about the ways in which certain forms of expressive (mis)action affect the (dis)ability of individual citizens. It continues to take shape. . As a result, the most commonly proposed remedies, especially the temptation to regulate lying, focus on the privilege and immunity of opinion. In short, we see fake news as an illicit cancerous growth and we want to eliminate it from our political system.
Building 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 proceed in three parts. Part 1, inspired by Lippmann's reminder that lying has been a problem for over a century, compares the lies of today's conservative political establishment with those of their predecessors during the era of McCarthy and mass resistance. The fact that angry, conspiratorial, and racist lies succeeded even in the very different media environment of the post-World War II “Golden Age” suggests that we should view the lies of the present moment not as an unprecedented epistemological crisis, but as a sign of change in American political life. Conservative political organization.
In the second part, I argue that these political formations are benefiting from the broader crisis in the American information economy. Using Lippmann's distinction between “news flow” and the politics of representation, it shows the collapse of journalism as a profession. This has led to an overproduction of information within politics and favored a politics of outrageous expression. Both have benefited conservative political organizations that seek to win elections through lies. Having developed this understanding of contemporary problems, Part 3 considers solutions to the lies that are currently prevalent.
Following Lippmann's 1919 reform proposals, the core mission would be a broader politics of democratic revitalization, which would include new efforts to improve the “news flow” by encouraging the production of information in new institutions dedicated to that mission. They claim that it is. These reform efforts should be contrasted with efforts to deal with lies by eradicating or countering them directly from discourse through censorship, civic education, and mandatory rebuttal. By focusing on the politics of opinion rather than information, reform efforts centered on speech and language risk worsening, rather than improving, the crisis in American democracy.