The Journalist and the Manipulator: Walter Lippmann, Karl Mannheim, and the Case for a “New Objectivity” to Check Demagoguery

Abstract

Prior to Donald Trump’s presidency, many scholars viewed the 1930s through the 1960s as the period when demagogues such as Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace posed the greatest threat to the American republic. Concerns about the public’s vulnerability to the emotional manipulation practiced by demagogues were, however, present from the founding forward, becoming particularly acute at the dawn of the modern age. This article argues that two important early twentieth century works, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, maintained that the demagogue’s most effective tool was the creation of an absolutist, often personalistic, mythology. Mannheim contended that journalists could combat the corrosive influence on the public of demagogues’ absolutist rhetoric by practicing a “new objectivity,” an approach to interpreting and explaining phenomena that encouraged “the broadest possible extension of [the public’s] horizon of vision.”

Notes

1 Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Lecture (December 8, 1980).

2 In The Hype Machine, Sinan Aral distinguishes between disinformation and misinformation thusly: “Disinformation is deliberate falsehood spread to deceive, while misinformation is spread regardless of its intent. Disinformation is a subset of misinformation.” Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—And How We Must Adapt (New York: Random House, 2020), 31.

3 Peter Dizikes, “Study: On Twitter, False News Travels Faster Than True Stories,” MIT News (March 8, 2018). See also Souroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6 (March 2018): 1146–51. This study is also described in Aral, The Hype Machine, 45–47.

4 Reinhard H. Luthin, “Flowering of the Southern Demagogue,” The American Scholar 20, no. 2 (Spring 1951): 185. The influence of demagogic politicians in many Southern states during the late-19th through the mid-20th century is also documented by V.O. Key in Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, [1949] 1984); and Eric A. Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump (New York: All Points Books, 2020), 142–46, 177–89.

5 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (3rd ed.) (New York: Harper Perennial, [1942] 2008), 145, 283.

6 Ronald Steel described the lasting influence of Public Opinion best when he noted in his foreword to the 1997 re-issue of the book that “the ideas it proposed have become a central part of our political vocabulary. We argue over these concepts no less today than when they were first advanced, for they go to the heart of democratic theory and our belief in the workings of popular government…. In [Public Opinion’s] wake [has flowed] a veritable industry of public opinion polls, academic courses, scholarly journals, foundations and institutes, and graduate degrees.” See Ronald Steel, foreword to Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), xi. Many social scientists credit Ideology and Utopia with creating the field of the sociology of knowledge. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann noted in their classic exploration of social constructionism, “It is safe to say that when sociologists today think of the sociology of knowledge, pro or con, they usually do so in terms of Mannheim’s formulation….” Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1966), 9, 11.

7 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 171.

8 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Martino, [1929] 2015), 1.

9 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 173 and Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 10.

10 As Mannheim averred, “Epistemology was the first significant philosophical product of the breakdown of the unitary world view with which the modern world was ushered in.” Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 11.

11 Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook, 9. In The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis echoes James Ceaser by arguing that the framers of the Constitution divided demagogues into two categories: hard demagogues who exploited the public’s fears and soft demagogues who won the public’s favor through flattery. See Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 28–31.

12 George Washington in Stephen F. Knott, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline of Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 6.

13 As quoted in Lee Davidson, “Wirthlin Remembered as Key to Reagan’s Success,” Salt Lake City Tribune (March 18, 2011).

14 Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008); Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2013).

15 Nicolas Demertzis, The Political Sociology of Emotions: Essays in Trauma and Ressentiment (New York: Routledge, 2020), xiii and 5.

16 Demertzis, Political Sociology, 5.

17 Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 25–33.

18 Posner makes a similar argument: “The concept of demagoguery as I use it assumes that self-government is possible, and is vulnerable because the people are sometimes susceptible to demagoguery (sic). Constitutional democracy thus depends on a knife-edge view that people can be trusted to act in their interest but not all the time.” Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook, 13. Later in this volume, Posner notes that “populism and demagoguery are features of virtually all economically advanced democratic societies, where the promise of political equality inevitably clashes with the rule of experts.” Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook, 229.

19 See, for example, the “Edelman Trust Barometer, 2021,” Edelman, Daniel J. Edelman Holdings, Inc, accessed November 10, 2021, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2021-trust-barometer. For a discussion of “the new conspiracism,” which, according to Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, differs from the “classic conspiracism” described by Richard Hofstadter by “dispensing with the burden of evidence” in its effort to delegitimize political institutions and disorient voters. See Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, 3. For Richard’s Hofstadter’s description of what Muirhead and Rosenblum call “classic conspiracism,” see Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine no. 11 (November 1964) and Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, [1964] 2008).

20 The Alethea Group provides a comprehensive and frequently updated survey and analysis of disinformation campaigns and the spread of misinformation. See Alethea Group, https://www.aletheagroup.com.

21 H. L. Mencken in Jack Shafer, “The Hard Truth about Memorializing the Pandemic,” Politico (February 23, 2021), accessed November 10, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/23/the-hard-truth-about-memorializing-the-pandemic-471197.

22 Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist #68” in The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter (New York: Penguin, [1788] 2003), 410–13 and Thomas M. Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

23 Lippmann titled the first chapter of A Preface to Morals, his meditation on the consequences of the ravages of the “acids of modernity” for human understanding, “Whirl Is King.” Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Time Incorporated, [1929] 1964).

24 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 217.

25 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 158.

26 See Stuart Ewen, “Educate the Public!” in PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 82–101; David Greenberg, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), 131; and Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Routledge, 1999), 270.

27 Mussolini described the crucial role that symbols and myths play in buttressing authoritarian leadership in one of his speeches, “We have created a myth. The myth is a faith, a noble enthusiasm. It does not have to be reality. It is an impulse and a hope, belief, and courage.” Benito Mussolini quoted in Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 123.

28 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 82.

29 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 82.

30 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 83. Many scholars are studying how many Americans’ investment in conspiracy theories is undermining institutional effectiveness. Americans’ long-standing interest in how powerful figures used secret machinations to control political institutions transmogrified during the Trump presidency into what Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum call “the new conspiracism,” which produces conspiracy theories that differ from past conspiracy theories in their effort to disorient the public and delegitimize institutions. See Muirhead Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying.

31 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 94.

32 Lippman, Public Opinion, 97.

33 Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 27” in Rossiter, The Federalist Papers, 170–73 and Lippmann, Public Opinion, 104.

34 Not all demagogues peddle ideologies or moral codes to their followers. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes in Strongmen, populist authoritarian leaders often cultivate little more than a cult of personality that flourishes through frequent invocations of nationalism, acts of wanton corruption, and strategic uses of violence. See R. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2020). Mannheim claimed that Fascism, in particular, has at “the heart of its theory and practice” “the belief in the decisive deed, and the significance attributed to the initiative of a leading elite…. No programmes are important, but unconditional subordination to a leader.” Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 119.

35 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 109.

36 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 111.

37 Lippman, Public Opinion, 119.

38 Lippman, Public Opinion, 28.

39 Lippman, Public Opinion, 133. It is important, however, as Nicolas Demertzis argues, to distinguish between “democratic emotionality” and “demagogic emotional manipulation.” “For the point is not to efface or disavow emotionality from political culture and the public sphere… the point is to substantiate the so-called sentimental citizen and emotional reflexivity.” Demertzis, The Political Sociology of Emotions, 9. A population in the throes of democratic emotionality will reject even indisputable facts if these facts question the validity of their feelings about an issue, event, or personality. As Joseph Schumpeter put it, “What is the good of ‘recognizing’ a recalcitrant fact if it is not allowed to influence conclusions?” Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 34.

40 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 175.

41 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 175.

42 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 176.

43 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 177 and 179.

44 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 184.

45 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 18, 20. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 143. Lippmann’s attachment to Pragmatism is most evident in passages such as this one in which he addresses the futility of the quest for a single, universal truth when so much is contingent. Lippmann’s interest in Pragmatism probably peaked during the interwar years when, as John Patrick Diggins observes, Lippmann saw in Pragmatism’s “rejection of foundationalism what might be called the beginning of inventionalism, the urge to make up in activity what cannot be discovered in theory.” Charles Wellborn, however, contends that Lippmann “never admitted to being a full-fledged pragmatist.” See Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 27; Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 95, 96; John Patrick Diggins, “From Pragmatism to Natural Law: Walter Lippmann’s Quest for the Foundations of Legitimacy,” Political Theory 19, no. 4 (November 1991): 535, 524, 530; a slightly modified version of this piece appears in John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 321–42; Charles Wellborn, Twentieth Century Pilgrimage: Walter Lippmann and the Public Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 16. A version of this endnote appeared in Ronald P. Seyb, “What Walter Saw: Walter Lippmann, The New York World, and Scientific Advocacy as an Alternative to the News-Opinion-Dichotomy,” Journalism History 41, no. 2 (Summer 2015), 68–69.

46 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 147. As Joseph Schumpeter observed, “… the mass of people never develops definite opinions on its own initiative. Still less is it able to articulate them and to turn them into consistent attitudes and actions. All it can do is to follow or refuse to follow such group leadership as may offer itself.” Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 145.

47 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 147.

48 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 158.

49 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 170, 171, 180, and 195. Lippmann’s critique of this ideal of democracy overlaps with Lenin’s claim that “the utopian promise of [the] capitalist-centered state of affairs is that anyone can take part in the administration of the state.” However, Lenin held, “Modern production (required) a technically necessary dictatorship.” James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 162.

50 Lippmann, of course, was not the only political commentator during the early twentieth century to argue that the people’s limitations and politicians’ suspect motives required enlisting a class of experts to shape government policy. Eric Posner, for example, maintains that “As the twentieth century rolled on, a consensus developed that policymaking… should be transferred, at least in part, from Congress to federal agencies. The agencies would be organized along scientific lines. They would be staffed with experts—scientists, economists, lawyers—who were charged with the task of solving social problems using expert techniques.” Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook, 163.

51 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 36. Italics added.

52 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 254.

53 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 259.

54 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 260.

55 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 260 and 261. Italics added.

56 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 5.

57 See Michael Schudson, “Objectivity Becomes Ideology: Journalism after World War I,” Discovering the News, 121–59; and Michael Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism,” Journalism 2, no. 2 (August 2001): 149–170.

58 Barbara M. Kelly, “Objectivity and the Trappings of Professionalism, 1900–1950,” in Fair and Balanced: A History of Journalistic Objectivity, edited by Steven R. Knowlton and Karen L. Freeman (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2005), 149, 157, 160.

59 One of the earliest of these codes of journalism, The Kansas Code of Ethics for Publishers, underscored that news was “the impartial portrayal of the decent activities of mind, men, and matter.” There are, however, scholars who maintain that objectivity was an important feature of journalistic thought and practice long before such codes emerged in the 1920s. David Mindich, for example, argues that the elements of objectivity seeped into journalism in a serial fashion between 1830 and 1890. Dan Schiller traces the origins of objectivity to an even earlier moment: the emergence of the penny press in the mid-1830s. Michael Schudson and Stephen J. A. Ward, on the other hand, do not see objectivity becoming journalists’ ethos until the 1920s. Steven Maras seeks to mediate this dispute by maintaining that objectivity can be best understood as consisting of a number of archaeological strata or layers that extend upward from the era of “proto-objectivity” in the 1830s to the post-1920 “ideal of objectivity.” See Kelly, “Objectivity and the Trappings of Professionalism, 1900–1950,” 149, 157, 160; David T. Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 113; Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 46; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 121–59; Stephen J.A. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 214–57; and Steven Maras, Objectivity in Journalism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 42–56; A version of this endnote appears in Seyb, “What Walter Saw.” 66–67.

60 Matthew H. Reavy, “Objectivity and Advocacy in Journalism,” Media Ethics 25, no. 1 (Fall 2013), accessed November 10, 2021, https://www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/179-fall-2013-vol-25-no-1/3999003-objectivity-and-advocacy-in-journalism.

61 Associated Press Media Editors Statement of Ethical Principles (1994), as quoted in Reavy, “Objectivity and Advocacy.” Matthew Pressman notes that at the Los Angeles Times, “the term ‘objectivity’ fell out of favor in the 1970s, as the publisher, editors, and many reporters thought its meaning had become too murky. They preferred to speak of ‘fairness.’” Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 9.

62 Victor Pickard, Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 32.

63 Pressman, On Press, 27. For a thorough examination of how and why the press failed to check McCarthy, see Edward R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

64 Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsrooms’ Notions of Objectivity,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (January 1972): 662.

65 Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual,” 664.

66 Tom Wolfe, “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” New York Magazine (February 14, 1972), accessed November 10, 2021, https://nymag.com/news/media/47353/.

67 Wolfe, “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism.’”

68 Joan Didion, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” reprinted in Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), 3–4, 5–9.

69 John H. McManus, “Objectivity: It’s Time to Say Goodbye,” Nieman Reports 63 no. 2 (Summer 2009): 79.

70 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 16.

71 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 16.

72 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 17.

73 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 20. The Australian doctor responsible for caring for his fellow POWs in a World War II Japanese POW camp in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North describes to one of the other POWs the importance of setting aside what one knows in order to continue to take action or, in this instance, to persevere: “It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy…. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.” Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (New York: Random House, 2013), 240.

74 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 34.

75 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 34.

76 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 37.

77 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 37.

78 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 42, 43. In A Preface to Morals, which was published the same year as Ideology and Utopia, Lippmann makes a similar plea for a “humanism” anchored in “detachment, understanding, and disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.” Lippmann contends that “the acids of modernity have dissolved the adjustments of the ancestral order” to the extent that “multitudes rather than a few are compelled to make radical and original adjustments.” In the absence of religion, “in the field of morals… the insight of the sages into the value of disinterestedness has become the clue to otherwise insoluble perplexities.” See Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals, 189, 194, 196, and 206.

79 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 43.

80 For a description of metis, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 6–7. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 44.

81 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 45. While the playwright Tom Stoppard has never explicitly argued for “the systemization of doubt,” he certainly understands that truth is most often not an absolute but a combination of parts, with some of those parts inaccessible to human understanding. As he commented in the 1972 documentary Tom Stoppard Doesn’t Know, “The truth about anything is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it because there is always something more to say.”

82 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 74.

83 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 71. Italics added.

84 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 75.

85 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 75. Italics added.

86 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 78.

87 As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels maintained, “… theory becomes a material force once it seizes the masses.” Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Aus Dem Literarischen Nachlass, Vol. 1, 392, quoted in Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 113, footnote 1.

88 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 86. As Eric Posner notes, the most important absolute for a demagogue is themselves: “While democracy depends on independent thought, reason, and commitment to compromise, the demagogue makes a religion of himself, inspiring slavish devotion.” Posner, The Demagogue’s Playbook, 35.

89 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 9.

90 Mannheim places a sharp point on this claim by quoting one of Mussolini’s speeches, “Our programme is quite simple: we wish to rule over Italy. People are always asking us about our programme. There are too many already. Italy’s salvation does not depend on programmes but on men and strong wills.” Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 119.

91 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 86.

92 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 87.

93 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 88.

94 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.” Or, as former French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France once observed, “To govern is to choose.”

95 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 93, 94, and 94–95. Italics added.

96 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 102–03.

97 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 106 and 122–23.

98 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 151, 154–55, 167, 169, and 265.

99 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 251.

100 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 266.

101 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 266–67.

102 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 270–71.

103 For example, Arlie Russell Hochschild concludes her ethnographic study of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana during the Obama era by maintaining that those who embraced the most nativist and discriminatory messages promulgated by Tea Party leaders subscribed to a “deep story” that portrays the disenfranchised as “cutting the line” that leads to the American Dream. See Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2018).

104 As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann observe in The Social Construction of Reality, political leaders may from time to time need to reinterpret the past in order to address challenges to a regime’s legitimacy. Such reinterpretations, in these instances, are not efforts to elide or distort the past for selfish or self-aggrandizing reasons. They are instead calibrated efforts to reinterpret the past “without… upsetting the institutional order.” Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 69. For how demagogues use the new conspiracism to delegitimize political institutions, see Muirhead and Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying.

105 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, Act II, Scene 4, Lines 7–9. The insurrectionist Jack Cade expressed the same position in a more pithy and direct fashion in The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, “My mouth shall be the Parliament of England.” Act IV, Scene 7, Line 14.

106 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, Act III, Scene 1, Lines 73–74.

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Ronald P. Seyb

Ronald P. Seyb is an associate professor of political science at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He teaches courses on the American presidency, the United States Congress, political psychology, and the media and politics. His research interests include media history, presidential management of the executive branch, and political oratory.