The essential text of the era was Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News, which he published in 1920. As an ambitious young editor at the New Republic, Lippmann had supported the Great War, but the public’s response to the conflict horrified him. He never expected the surge of raw, ugly xenophobia that followed Wilson’s call to arms. It was a “reign of terror” fed by a “hurricane of demagogy.” The sheer ignorance of the public horrified him, and he pinned blame on the press. “In an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”
