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Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 - December 14, 1974), was an influential United States writer, journalist, and political commentator.

Early life

Lippmann was born in New York City to German-Jewish parents, Jacob and Daisy Baum Lippmann. The family lived a comfortable, if not privileged, life. Annual family trips to Europe were the rule.

At age 17, he entered Harvard University where he studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas. He concentrated on philosophy and languages (he spoke both German and French) and graduated after only three years of study.

Journalism

In 1913 Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic magazine. During World War I, Lippmann became an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points.

Lippmann had wide access to the nation's decision makers and had no sympathy for communism. But the Golos spy ring used Mary Price, his secretary, to garner information on items Lippmann chose not to write about or names of Lippmann's sources, often not carried in stories, but of use to the MGB (USSR).

Early on, Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy. He believed that the American people would become intellectually engaged in political and world issues and fulfill their democratic role as an educated electorate. In light of the events leading to World War II and the concomitant scourge of totalitarianism however, he rejected this view. Lippmann came to be seen as Noam Chomsky's moral and intellectual antithesis: He agreed with the Platonic view that the population is a great beast, a herd, that has to be controlled by an intellectual specialist class. Chomsky used one of Lippmann's catch phrases for the title of his book about the media: Manufacturing Consent.

See also: Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays

Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, found that the New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik revolution was neither unbiased nor accurate.

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas. In addition to his newspaper columns, he published several books. Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to common currency in his 1947 book by the same name.

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1889 births | 1974 deaths | Pulitzer Prize winners | Jewish American writers | Propagandists

Walter Lippmann | Walter Lippmann | Walter Lippmann | ウォルター・リップマン

 

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