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Liberty and the News
In this forthright critique of the press as a threat to American democracy and a danger to the value of liberty at large, Lippman asserts the central, indispensable connection between liberty and truth. Taking aim at the press, Lippman denounces its propensity to promote its own agendas and purposes rather than promulgate the truthful exchange of facts and the free flow of ideas. Liberty and the News is a masterful portrayal of a problem still highly relevant today. Lippman's insights and vision for a better way to disseminate the news are highly eluminating.
100 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Walter Lippmann
170 books184 followersWalter Lippmann was an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator who gained notoriety for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War. Lippmann was twice awarded (1958 and 1962) a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, "Today and Tomorrow."
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 4, 2023
This is definitely a book that requires concentration and effort, but Lippmann makes some very valid points that are even more relevant today than they were when he wrote it in the 1920s. I found it a bit depressing because I don't see any positive change happening any time in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, the news has become an entertainment/money-making business instead of an information business. Lippmann makes some great points about how crucial it is in a democracy for the news to actually be facts, not opinions or "alternative facts."
If you have any interest in journalism, propaganda, and politics, you may find this book enlightening! I did.
If you have any interest in journalism, propaganda, and politics, you may find this book enlightening! I did.
March 25, 2018
Fresh from reading David Frum’s Trumpocracy, it seemed like a good time to examine Walter Lippmann’s essays looking at journalism, propaganda and their impact on democracy. Lippmann, co-founder of The New Republic and a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, wrote these in the wake of WWI, outraged by wartime misinformation fed to the public. Lippmann called out newspapers (it was only newspaper readers at the time) for failing to provide readers with facts, preferring to dispense government-approved information/propaganda or material tailored to the media bias/perspective preferred by the publishers of the day. He derides the lack of media objectivity and its impact on truth and liberty. But he also questions the desire and ability of the public to make the effort to seek out and demand facts, to critically examine information.
Anything sound familiar?
This tiny tome, only 94 pages long, provides a wealth of material worth considering. Many of Lippmann’s observations are incredibly relevant a century later: addressing stark media bias, the fear/mistrust of immigrants and increasing nationalist sentiments around the globe. It would be easy to distil this as an attack on all newspapers/media, or the so-called fake news that certain 2018 leaders have dubbed any information that disagrees with the message they want to put forward. But it’s not that simple.
Lippmann assumed post WWI that people were passive and must be protected from propaganda. “The quack, the charlatan, the jingo and the terrorist can flourish only when the audience is deprived of independent access to information,” wrote Lippmann. But today, a significant portion of the public chooses information sources that play to their prejudices and even a foreign state can choose to play upon those biases to sway public opinion and elections. And as Lippmann noted, “the real enemy is ignorance, from which all of us, conservative, liberal or revolutionary, suffer.”
This collection of essays, published by Princeton University Press in 2008, includes an afterword examining the behavior of the media and the George W Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. At that time, any media voice that raised skepticism of the evidence supporting war on Iraq and Saddam Hussein was derided as unpatriotic and largely silenced when Bush officials including Vice President Dick Cheney complained to the CEOs of major media corporations. I remember speaking with journalists from major US media organizations who said at the time, they couldn’t question or push back against the administration’s moves. I expect the next edition will also include an analysis of how journalism has covered the Trump administration and how democracy has evolved. Or survived.
Anything sound familiar?
This tiny tome, only 94 pages long, provides a wealth of material worth considering. Many of Lippmann’s observations are incredibly relevant a century later: addressing stark media bias, the fear/mistrust of immigrants and increasing nationalist sentiments around the globe. It would be easy to distil this as an attack on all newspapers/media, or the so-called fake news that certain 2018 leaders have dubbed any information that disagrees with the message they want to put forward. But it’s not that simple.
Lippmann assumed post WWI that people were passive and must be protected from propaganda. “The quack, the charlatan, the jingo and the terrorist can flourish only when the audience is deprived of independent access to information,” wrote Lippmann. But today, a significant portion of the public chooses information sources that play to their prejudices and even a foreign state can choose to play upon those biases to sway public opinion and elections. And as Lippmann noted, “the real enemy is ignorance, from which all of us, conservative, liberal or revolutionary, suffer.”
This collection of essays, published by Princeton University Press in 2008, includes an afterword examining the behavior of the media and the George W Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. At that time, any media voice that raised skepticism of the evidence supporting war on Iraq and Saddam Hussein was derided as unpatriotic and largely silenced when Bush officials including Vice President Dick Cheney complained to the CEOs of major media corporations. I remember speaking with journalists from major US media organizations who said at the time, they couldn’t question or push back against the administration’s moves. I expect the next edition will also include an analysis of how journalism has covered the Trump administration and how democracy has evolved. Or survived.
July 15, 2026
“Liberty and the News:
Tasks of liberty: protect sources of the news, organization of the news so as to make it comprehensible, and education of human response.”
So long as we were content to argue about the privileges and immunities of opinion we were missing the point. We should never succeed in fixing a standard of tolerance for opinions if we concentrated all our attention on the opinions.
Opinions are derived from the stream of news that reaches the public and the protection of that stream is the critical interest in a modern state.
Make the validity of the news our ideal. We shall be protecting for the public interest that which all the special interests in the world are almost anxious to corrupt.”
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not more effective.”
The sensible procedure in matters affecting the liberty of opinion would be to ensure as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.”
They are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise.”
The present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”
The current theory of American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities of civilization require the sacrifice.”
All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.”
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
The tension of fear produces sterility. Men cease to say what they think and when they cease to say it, they soon cease to think it. They think in reference to their critics and not in reference to the facts.”
The word Liberty is a weapon and an advertisement but certainly not an ideal which transcends all special aims.”
If there were any man who believed in Liberty apart from particular purposes, that man would be a hermit contemplating all existence with a hopeful and neutral eye.”
9/10ths of the effort to live and let live consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is really a matter of indifference.”
John Stuart Mill: did not believe the theological view, did not fear damnation, and was convinced that morality did not depend upon the religious sanction. A more reasoned morality could be formed by laying aside theological assumptions.”
The traditional core of liberty, the notion of indifference, is too feeble and unreal a doctrine to protect the purpose of liberty, which is the furnishing of a healthy environment in which human judgement and inquiry can most successfully organize human life.”
News comes from a distance; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them.”
If I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible.”
The public, when it is dependent on testimony and protected by no rules of evidence, can act only on the excitement of its pugnacities and its hopes.”
Censorship operates also through congestion and the resultant need of a system of priority. Congestion makes possible good and bad service and undesirable messages are not infrequently served badly.”
Once you know the party and social affiliations of a newspaper, you can predict with considerable certainty the perspective in which the news will be displayed.”
A nation easily acts like a crowd. Under the influence of headlines and panicky print, the contagion of unreason can easily spread through a settled community.”
Gresham’s Law of the emotions
A society which lives at second-hand will commit incredible follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if their contact is intermittent and untrustworthy.”
Demagoguery is a parasite that flourishes where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips with things themselves are impervious to it.”
The demagogue consciously or unconsciously is an undetected liar.
Decisions in the modern state tend to be made by the interaction of public opinion and the executive, not Congress.”
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”
In times of great insecurity, certain opinion acting in unstable minds may cause infinite disaster.”
The desire to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the cause of freedom.”
We cannot successfully define liberty or accomplish it by a series of permissions and prohibitions. For that is to ignore the content of opinion in favor of its form.
Liberty is the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment. Liberty is the name we give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of the information upon which we act.”
Only by an early and sympathetic effort to deal with greater evils can the more sensible minds retain their control.”
The run of the news is handled by men of much smaller caliber. It is handled by such men because reporting is not a dignified profession for which men will invest the time and cost of an education but an underpaid, insecure, anonymous form of drudgery.
Observation must precede every other activity and the public observer is a man of critical value.
Health of society depends upon the quality of the information it receives.
Just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest of scientific virtues.
It is a measure of our education as a people that so many of us are perfectly content to love our political lives in the fraudulent environment of unanalyzed words.
Education that shall make men masters of their vocabulary is one of the central interests of liberty.
News of society almost always starts from a special group.
Chief purpose of news is to enable mankind to live successfully towards the future. The world is a process- never quite the same.
Tolerance is an arbitrary line. The determining factor is the significance of the opinion to be tolerated.
Liberty is not so much permission as it is the construction of a system of information increasingly independent of opinion.
Without a clear conception of what the means of liberty are, the struggle for free speech and free opinion easily degenerates into a mere contest of opinion.”
Tasks of liberty: protect sources of the news, organization of the news so as to make it comprehensible, and education of human response.”
So long as we were content to argue about the privileges and immunities of opinion we were missing the point. We should never succeed in fixing a standard of tolerance for opinions if we concentrated all our attention on the opinions.
Opinions are derived from the stream of news that reaches the public and the protection of that stream is the critical interest in a modern state.
Make the validity of the news our ideal. We shall be protecting for the public interest that which all the special interests in the world are almost anxious to corrupt.”
True opinions can prevail only if the facts to which they refer are known; if they are not known, false ideas are just as effective as true ones, if not more effective.”
The sensible procedure in matters affecting the liberty of opinion would be to ensure as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.”
They are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise.”
The present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”
The current theory of American newspaperdom is that an abstraction like the truth and a grace like fairness must be sacrificed whenever anyone thinks the necessities of civilization require the sacrifice.”
All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.”
There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
The tension of fear produces sterility. Men cease to say what they think and when they cease to say it, they soon cease to think it. They think in reference to their critics and not in reference to the facts.”
The word Liberty is a weapon and an advertisement but certainly not an ideal which transcends all special aims.”
If there were any man who believed in Liberty apart from particular purposes, that man would be a hermit contemplating all existence with a hopeful and neutral eye.”
9/10ths of the effort to live and let live consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is really a matter of indifference.”
John Stuart Mill: did not believe the theological view, did not fear damnation, and was convinced that morality did not depend upon the religious sanction. A more reasoned morality could be formed by laying aside theological assumptions.”
The traditional core of liberty, the notion of indifference, is too feeble and unreal a doctrine to protect the purpose of liberty, which is the furnishing of a healthy environment in which human judgement and inquiry can most successfully organize human life.”
News comes from a distance; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them.”
If I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible.”
The public, when it is dependent on testimony and protected by no rules of evidence, can act only on the excitement of its pugnacities and its hopes.”
Censorship operates also through congestion and the resultant need of a system of priority. Congestion makes possible good and bad service and undesirable messages are not infrequently served badly.”
Once you know the party and social affiliations of a newspaper, you can predict with considerable certainty the perspective in which the news will be displayed.”
A nation easily acts like a crowd. Under the influence of headlines and panicky print, the contagion of unreason can easily spread through a settled community.”
Gresham’s Law of the emotions
A society which lives at second-hand will commit incredible follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if their contact is intermittent and untrustworthy.”
Demagoguery is a parasite that flourishes where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips with things themselves are impervious to it.”
The demagogue consciously or unconsciously is an undetected liar.
Decisions in the modern state tend to be made by the interaction of public opinion and the executive, not Congress.”
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”
In times of great insecurity, certain opinion acting in unstable minds may cause infinite disaster.”
The desire to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the cause of freedom.”
We cannot successfully define liberty or accomplish it by a series of permissions and prohibitions. For that is to ignore the content of opinion in favor of its form.
Liberty is the process by which men educate their responses and learn to control their environment. Liberty is the name we give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of the information upon which we act.”
Only by an early and sympathetic effort to deal with greater evils can the more sensible minds retain their control.”
The run of the news is handled by men of much smaller caliber. It is handled by such men because reporting is not a dignified profession for which men will invest the time and cost of an education but an underpaid, insecure, anonymous form of drudgery.
Observation must precede every other activity and the public observer is a man of critical value.
Health of society depends upon the quality of the information it receives.
Just because news is complex and slippery, good reporting requires the exercise of the highest of scientific virtues.
It is a measure of our education as a people that so many of us are perfectly content to love our political lives in the fraudulent environment of unanalyzed words.
Education that shall make men masters of their vocabulary is one of the central interests of liberty.
News of society almost always starts from a special group.
Chief purpose of news is to enable mankind to live successfully towards the future. The world is a process- never quite the same.
Tolerance is an arbitrary line. The determining factor is the significance of the opinion to be tolerated.
Liberty is not so much permission as it is the construction of a system of information increasingly independent of opinion.
Without a clear conception of what the means of liberty are, the struggle for free speech and free opinion easily degenerates into a mere contest of opinion.”
January 14, 2026
Then as now, the press has functioned in a manner that claims it is all-knowing. This permits those who consume news to also benefit from this claim. Lipmann has done an incredible job in exposing precisely how the news is 'constructed'. He has also added a section detailing how it is easy to smear immigrants in the news. As you can imagine, this remains quite topical.
One critique is that he gives us no real alternative apart from being more sceptical of our sources. I would wonder what he thinks about confirmation bias (given that we now do have a semblance of choice in where we receive our news from).
One critique is that he gives us no real alternative apart from being more sceptical of our sources. I would wonder what he thinks about confirmation bias (given that we now do have a semblance of choice in where we receive our news from).
March 31, 2025
58 pages. Almost everyone folded over and marked for quotations. Not as important as the 'Sermon on the Mount' but quite well written. Given human nature, his solution is a bit of wishful thinking but, "But I am equally convinced that democracy will degenerate into this dictatorship either of the Right or of the Left, if it does not become genuinely self-governing. That means, in terms of public opinion, a resumption of that contact between beliefs and realities which we have been losing steadily since the small-town democracy was absorbed into the Great Society."
January 5, 2024
Facts should trump opinions
"We cannot fight the untruth which envelops us by parading our opinions. We can do if only by reporting the facts, and we do not deserve to win if the facts are against us."
"We cannot fight the untruth which envelops us by parading our opinions. We can do if only by reporting the facts, and we do not deserve to win if the facts are against us."
July 7, 2019
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May 3, 2019
Written just after WWI, the text will be surprisingly fresh to some in light of today's controversies over 'fake' news and editorial bias. This tome is actually two essays: the first that gives the title to the overall book and then 'A Test of the News', more of an investigation of the New York Times' reporting of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Allied intervention and civil war.
The first essay sees Lippmann lambasting news reporting for its numerous failings, especially for thinking that its primary responsibility was to guide society and not provide accurate information. Sounds familiar, no? Unfortunately, the essay falls short of providing any meaningful solution, and Lippmann doesn't even seem to take into consideration the possibility that people will eventually simply disregard the news.
'A Test of the News' is the more interesting of the two in my mind, probably because it deals with the tangible reality of what was in the headlines compared to what actually happened. Lippmann shows quite convincingly how the news was slanted by the paper's editorial bias in its choice of emphasis of headlines and placement of articles. Most telling was a comparison of opinions on the crucial question of whether Russia would stay in the war (and hence keep German troops from redeploying to the Western front). The Times loudly trumpeted 'highly placed' sources insisting that Russia was fully committed to the fight, but buried an interview with Leon Trotsky (the Trotsky) who stated that the Russians were played out after so many military defeats. The essay goes on to show numerous other instances of the paper having a preference for official communiques as opposed to having reporters actually go do some real reporting. Again, sounds familiar, no?
In the end, though, Lippmann never addresses issues like how is a reporter supposed to be qualified to report on things like military campaigns and diplomatic conferences and why don't other newspapers report on other newspaper's failings. All in all, mildly interesting but by this point in time a century later, we already know it's fake news.
The first essay sees Lippmann lambasting news reporting for its numerous failings, especially for thinking that its primary responsibility was to guide society and not provide accurate information. Sounds familiar, no? Unfortunately, the essay falls short of providing any meaningful solution, and Lippmann doesn't even seem to take into consideration the possibility that people will eventually simply disregard the news.
'A Test of the News' is the more interesting of the two in my mind, probably because it deals with the tangible reality of what was in the headlines compared to what actually happened. Lippmann shows quite convincingly how the news was slanted by the paper's editorial bias in its choice of emphasis of headlines and placement of articles. Most telling was a comparison of opinions on the crucial question of whether Russia would stay in the war (and hence keep German troops from redeploying to the Western front). The Times loudly trumpeted 'highly placed' sources insisting that Russia was fully committed to the fight, but buried an interview with Leon Trotsky (the Trotsky) who stated that the Russians were played out after so many military defeats. The essay goes on to show numerous other instances of the paper having a preference for official communiques as opposed to having reporters actually go do some real reporting. Again, sounds familiar, no?
In the end, though, Lippmann never addresses issues like how is a reporter supposed to be qualified to report on things like military campaigns and diplomatic conferences and why don't other newspapers report on other newspaper's failings. All in all, mildly interesting but by this point in time a century later, we already know it's fake news.
March 29, 2014
Walter Lippman's Liberty and the News is a critical book in understanding how the press can endanger our freedom. Lippman contends that there is a strong relationship between our freedom and the truth being reported in the media. The historical context of this book is that Lippman wrote it after the end of World War I. Lippman condemned all the propaganda and the distortions of the truth reported by the media. The book is divided into three essays: Journalism and the Higher Law, What Modern Liberty Means, and Liberty and the News. Lippman was a brilliant man, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
August 29, 2019
It’s three chapters of quotable insights and philosophy. Although Lippmann later recounts this work, in the modern age it remains relevant. The thesis is pretty simple: The concept of liberty is not just a freedom from a restriction of choices but the awakening of the mind from ignorance. Good shit.
December 29, 2013
Quite relevant for looking at our media today, even though Lippmann wrote it almost a hundred years ago. He points to the media's inclination to be a lapdog to vested and powerful interests, and he mourns the absence of independent, non-ideological journalism.
August 3, 2013
This is Lippman's masterpiece on Freedom of Press and Liberty issues surrounding news industry. Never ever gets old.
Read
March 17, 2013A classic in the mass comm field.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews