Word: lippmanns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...same impulse that led Lippmann to criticize public opinion's stereotypes, and to distrust crowds and disorderly masses of ordinary people generally, led him to write in 1914 of the need, first and foremost, for "exorcising of bogeys." It led him to write in 1920, as millions of people faced hunger, privation and a war that still smoldered, that "the real enemy is ignorance." It led him to reverse himself and accept the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti as soon as a commission headed by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell endorsed it. And four decades later, Lippmann's opposition...
...Lippmann's distrust for ordinary people and events permeated his writing. The simplest matter was likely to set him pontificating about the need for a synthesis between Jeffersonian liberty and Hamiltonian authority, or half-whimsically going back to liberal first principles. And though such an attitude seems particularly silly for a journalist presumably dedicated to letting ordinary readers know about day-to-day events, it's precisely this quality that folks this week were praising...
...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...