Word: lippmann
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...Walter Lippmann, 1969 He could have held his own in an 18th century salon or coffeehouse, spar ring civilly with the prophets of the Enlightenment. His faith in the dispassion ate application of reason to the muddle of human affairs was no less firm than Voltaire's. His prowess at drawing his tory's sweep from the minutiae of daily events might have impressed even Gibbon. Had they discoursed on politics, he and Edmund Burke would have found themselves on the same aloof Olympian plane...
...Lippmann left Cambridge a genteel Socialist, worked for a year on Lincoln Steffens' muckraking Everybody's Magazine. His first book, A Preface to Politics, was written after he served a brief stint as secretary to the Rev. George R. Lunn of Schenectady, N.Y., one of America's first Socialist mayors. But no dogma could contain Lippmann for long. He soon abandoned Socialism-but not all of its causes-and in 1914 became one of the founders of the liberal New Republic...
During the war years, Lippmann left journalism briefly to serve as a member of "the Inquiry," a clandestine group of theorists charged by President Wilson with drawing up terms of an acceptable peace. The young adviser helped formulate Wilson's Fourteen Points and prepared a commentary on the peace terms to clarify them for the Allies. But Lippmann was disillusioned by the Versailles Treaty, believing that the conditions it imposed would inexorably lead to another war. He returned briefly to the New Republic, and then in 1921 signed on as an editorial writer for Joseph Pulitzer...
...LIPPMANN "had little direct impact on the general public," Richard H. Rovere, The New Yorker's political analyst, wrote, but he was "read with immense respect by presidents and other policymaking officials and much of what he thought and said found its way into the democratic consensus." That newspapers are written for the general public, not presidents and other policymaking officials, didn't bother Rovere, any more than his picture of a "democratic consensus" arrived at by presidents and other policymaking officials, not the general public, seems to. James Reston, The New York Time ex-vice-president who's sometimes...
...suggested--undertaking a ruthless criticism of everything existing. But all these things involve an attempt to learn from and about the news of the day and to report on it--not an imparting of wisdom from Olympian heights to those mired in the news's reality. The inadequacy of Lippmann's call for making journalism one of the "liberal professions"--presumably a special estate with responsibilities and privileges all its own, instead of a group of workers doing a job like everyone else--suggests the inadequacies of his own journalism: its elitism, its detachment, its effort to teach people...