What Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion can Teach us 100 Years Later

Journalist and political scientist Walter Lippmann (1889 - 1974) first used his famous phrase, the “manufacture of consent,” in Liberty and the News (1919), in order to focus public attention on a “crisis of western democracy,” the “crisis in journalism.” The point he made then, and later elaborated in Public Opinion (1922), was that democracy by consent could not function when private interests invested in “manufacturing” and disseminating ideas that would benefit their own economic and political affairs controlled the press. Lippmann expressed a fear that “men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions.” News was gotten second-hand, at best, and came down from biased sources, since both newspaper reporters and their eye-witnesses lacked training in intellectual objectivity. Public Opinion thus articulates a psychology of modern media, locating the sources of bias within the very structures of human cognition.

Walter Lippmann, 1936

We didn't get to this information dystopia overnight.

The Trump administration’s so-called “flood-the-zone” strategy for dominating the information space is not a recent invention.  In fact, we can trace its origins to the propaganda campaigns leading up to the First World War—then called the “Great War.”

A century ago, media critic and political commentator Walter Lippmann coined the phrase “the manufacture of consent” in his analysis of newspaper bias in Liberty and the News (1919). Lippmann feared that “men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information. But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions.” Lippmann had discovered a truth now all too familiar: Corporate and government interests, playing upon individual bias, are adept at corrupting the sources of information upon which our democracy depends.

We live in a time when perception increasingly seems to drive reality. Headline-hogging accounts of the Trump-Musk administration’s audacious actions, and endless sound-bites across every form of media—from grass-roots and mainstream networks to podcasts and streaming services—create what Lippmann called the “pseudo-environment” in which propaganda thrives, and, well—propagates, like so many dandelion seeds. Its "ideas" take root and reinforce the exaggerations or outright lies that make up the Trumpian pseudo-environment. 

In Lippmann’s time, President Woodrow Wilson was reelected on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” On April 13, 1917, Wilson did something that no other American president had ever done.  He established a federal agency to shape public opinion: the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the brainchild of former Rocky Mountain News editor and muckraking reporter George Creel. Creel and a cadre of writers and social institutions published information targeted to persuade a US population made up of Irish immigrants (resentful of Great Britain) and recent arrivals from Germany and Eastern Europe to join Britain and France in an unpopular war against Germany and its allies.

American propaganda campaigns during the First World War depended upon an increasingly technological and bureaucratized form of religious conversion. The new social sciences of persuasion, advertising and marketing, each deploying the principles of behaviorist psychology, used repetition and exposure to influence Americans' beliefs. The CPI steered public opinion by uniting disparate individuals under an appealing group identity, that of Americans fighting for shared ideals, freedom and democracy. But nothing unites like a common enemy. Their goal, as commentators on Creel’s CPI suggest, was to inculcate a reflexive antipathy toward the so-called “Hun,” the pejorative term for Germans at the time. One of Creel’s recruits, California novelist Gertrude Atherton, described in her autobiography how she sought to “cultivate” hatred toward the Germans, noting that “virulent” was a “weak word” for her publications supporting the Allied cause.

Like today’s influencers, early propagandists manipulated belief by exploiting familiar narrative forms. Manufactured lies, gossip, and innuendo masqueraded during the First World War as truth: that German “corpse factories” processed enemy soldiers for soap; that German soldiers hacked the hands off Belgian babies; that German rapists rampaged through peaceful Belgian streets; and that the British civilian ship RMS Lusitania carried no munitions (it did: some 5,400 cases). Atrocity stories found all-too-willing believers. Civic leaders led grass-roots campaigns against immigration and cultural pluralism. “Four-minute men” gave impromptu lectures before performances, ginning up support for war bonds, while the daily repetition and ritual consumption of biased information fueled a gradual conversion from ambivalence to full-throated endorsements of the US entry into the First World War. In all these ways, the propagandists of the early twentieth-century wrote the playbook on flooding the zone, the calculated process of overwhelming mainstream news outlets with a barrage of dubious, slanted, or simply "fake" information.

The startling effectiveness of propaganda led Lippmann to a more forceful media critique in Public Opinion (1922), a work that lays bare a psychology of modern media, locating the sources of bias within the very structures of human thought: our compulsion to react and our failure to reflect. Whether by flooding the zone with disinformation or by bullying others into silence, the creation of a “pseudo-environment” in which misinformation can thrive works when we individually and collectively “censor out much that needs to be taken into account,” as Lippmann put it. Stereotypes, for example, are a “voluntary” form of censorship based on our own incomplete knowledge of events and other people. He called for a class of “knowledge workers” who would educate the electorate by complicating stereotypes, sifting the news for facts, and disseminating the hard kernels of truth.

Today, social media performs the work that ordinary citizen-propagandists performed more than one hundred years ago. Now, as then, we are undergoing a real-time psychological experiment, based upon our brain’s experience-dependent plasticity—because of our brain’s malleability we can change our own minds by repeated exposure to new thoughts and ideas. Like ancient river streams leaving canyons in their wake, time and repetition etch the memes and narratives circulating on social media ever deeper into our minds -- and once minds are made up, they are nearly impossible to change.

But with pressing threats to the environment and to public health, soaring income inequality, and the global rise of a new strain of fascism, why are we letting algorithms guide our behavior? How can we push back?  How can we rehabilitate the public sphere and protect our minds from the assault from without?

In identifying the symbolic elements—the dehumanization of victims, the murder of innocents, the subversive enchantments of ethnic “otherness”—American, so-called “modernist” writers after the Great War developed powerful weapons against propaganda: an exposure of its familiar narrative structures and its psychological methods. By associating the war’s repetitive, divisive slogans with spiritual despair and physical decline, early twentieth-century works showed how Creel and others not only practiced behaviorist forms of operant conditioning, but also spread the contagion of hatred to an increasingly dysfunctional “public mind.” For some insight into the psychology of early “fake news” read Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, and John Dos Passos’s 1919—the first of his USA trilogy. These and other literary works from the early twentieth century’s great era of social engineering shine light on the artistic processes and cultural institutions that fuelled the early twentieth-century’s psychological experiment in mass conversion. By mid-century people were on to propaganda. In 2025, we just have new names and technologies and for the same old game of manufacturing consent.