"Think back to the famous 1920s debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The argument—begun by Lippmann with a series of three brilliant books published between 1919 and 1925 and ended by Dewey in 1927 with his book-length response to Public Opinion, Lippmann’s masterpiece—turned on many issues simultaneously but rested foundationally on the two men’s differing conceptions of truth. Lippmann understood reality to be “picturable.” Truth can be discovered by matching an independent, objective reality against a language that corresponds to it. This is where, in Lippmann’s view, democratic theory breaks down.
Lippmann argued that the social and political events that determine our collective destiny are well beyond the public’s range of experience and expertise.Only through incomplete, poorly comprehended media reports are these events made accessible. Public opinion, therefore, is shaped in response to people’s “maps” or “images” of the world and not to the world itself. Mass political consciousness does not pertain to the factual “environment” but to an intermediary “pseudo-environment.”
To complicate matters, this pseudo-environment is corrupted by the manner in which it is received.Given both the economic and professional limitations of the practice of journalism, Lippmann argued, news “comes [to us] helter-skelter.” This is fine for a baseball box score, a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch. But where the picture is more complex, the result is largely “derangement, misunderstanding and . . . misinterpretation.” Lippmann compared the average citizen to a deaf spectator sitting in the back row of a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen; he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.”
John Dewey did not attempt to defend the public’s sophistication with regard to public affairs but insisted instead that Lippmann misunderstood the meaning of truth in a democratic society. While Lippmann argued for what the late journalism scholar James W. Carey termed a “spectator theory of knowledge,” Dewey viewed knowledge as a function of “communication and association.” Systematic inquiry, reified by Lippmann, was to Dewey only the beginning of knowledge. “Vision is a spectator,” he wrote. “Hearing is a participator.” The basis of democracy is not information but conversation."
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Lippmann argued that the social and political events that determine our collective destiny are well beyond the public’s range of experience and expertise.Only through incomplete, poorly comprehended media reports are these events made accessible. Public opinion, therefore, is shaped in response to people’s “maps” or “images” of the world and not to the world itself. Mass political consciousness does not pertain to the factual “environment” but to an intermediary “pseudo-environment.”
To complicate matters, this pseudo-environment is corrupted by the manner in which it is received.Given both the economic and professional limitations of the practice of journalism, Lippmann argued, news “comes [to us] helter-skelter.” This is fine for a baseball box score, a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch. But where the picture is more complex, the result is largely “derangement, misunderstanding and . . . misinterpretation.” Lippmann compared the average citizen to a deaf spectator sitting in the back row of a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen; he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.”
John Dewey did not attempt to defend the public’s sophistication with regard to public affairs but insisted instead that Lippmann misunderstood the meaning of truth in a democratic society. While Lippmann argued for what the late journalism scholar James W. Carey termed a “spectator theory of knowledge,” Dewey viewed knowledge as a function of “communication and association.” Systematic inquiry, reified by Lippmann, was to Dewey only the beginning of knowledge. “Vision is a spectator,” he wrote. “Hearing is a participator.” The basis of democracy is not information but conversation."
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