The Non-Jewish Jew: Walter Lippmann and the Pitfalls of Journalistic “Detachment”

Abstract

Walter Lippmann has been touted by historians as “the most wise and forceful spokesman for the ideal of objectivity” during the years when objectivity became journalism’s foundational professional standard. But Lippmann has also been roundly criticized as a self-hating Jew for columns about assimilation and the rise of Hitler, columns that, like all his writing, were shaped by his own, idiosyncratic belief in journalistic “detachment.” His mishandling of what was then called “the Jewish question” highlights the dilemma of weighing a journalist’s professional commitment to detachment against the contrary assertion that the best journalism “comes from somewhere and stands for something.” The full story of this controversy offers clarity about poorly understood challenges with standards that traditional news outlets and digital platforms still face today.

Notes

1 Walter Lippmann, “Hitler’s Speech,” Today and Tomorrow, Daily Boston Globe, May 19, 1933, 24.

2 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 151.

3 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little Brown, 1980), 330–1.

4 Steven R. Knowlton and Karen L. Freeman, eds. Fair & Balanced: A History of Journalistic Objectivity (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2005), 3, 5.

5 Brad Snyder, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Jeremy McCarter, Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals (New York: Random House, 2017); Steel, Walter Lippmann; Schudson, Discovering the News; Schudson, “The Objectivity Norm in American Journalism,” Journalism 2, no. 2 (2001): 149–170.

6 See Brian McNair, “After Objectivity? Schudson’s Sociology of Journalism in the Era of Post-Factuality,” Journalism Studies 18, no. 10 (2017): 1318–1333; and C. W. Anderson, “Knowledge, Expertise, and Professional Practice in the Sociology of Michael Schudson,” Journalism Studies 18, no. 10 (2017): 1307–1317. Both are from a special issue focusing on Schudson’s work.

7 Walter Lippmann, “Traffic in Absolutes, an Extract from John Dewey, with a Review, and a Footnote,” New Republic, July 17, 1915. Lippmann wrote “The Footnote.”

8 Alden Whitman, “Walter Lippmann, Political Analyst, Dead at 85,” New York Times, December 15, 1974.

9 Steel, Walter Lippmann, xii.

10 Ibid., 180, 280.

11 Anthony Lewis, “The Mysteries of Walter Lippmann,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1980, 4.

12 Ibid., 3.

13 Steel, Walter Lippmann, 14, citing Alistair Buchan, “The Name That Opened Every Door,” Observer (London), December 15, 1974.

14 Ibid., Chapter 11, “The Inquiry.”

15 Walter Lippmann to Colonel House, June 16, 1918, Edward M. House Papers (henceforth EHP), Yale University Library.

16 Walter Lippmann to Colonel House, August 9, 1918; Lippmann to House, August 15, 1918, EHP.

17 Woodrow Wilson to Colonel House, August 31, 1918; House to Wilson, September 3; House to Lippmann, September 6; Lippmann to House, October 2, EHP.

18 Steel, Walter Lippmann, 144–154.

19 Ibid., 152.

20 Walter Lippmann, “For a Department of State,” New Republic, September 17, 1919, 196.

21 Steel, Walter Lippmann, 167, citing Lippmann to Newton D. Baker, January 17, 1920.

22 Jennifer Keene, “A ‘Brutalizing’ War? The USA after the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 1 (2015): 78–99.

23 Snyder, House of Truth, 289.

24 Ibid., 289–291.

25 Walter Lippmann, “The Basic Problem of Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1919, 616–627.

26 Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 19–20, 35.

27 Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 67.

28 Lippmann, 38.

29 Lippmann, 5.

30 Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News,” New Republic, August 4, 1920, 1–41.

31 Lippmann and Merz, 1, 2.

32 Lippmann and Merz, 3.

33 Lippmann and Merz, 3, 13, 40.

34 Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 49, 54–55.

35 Lippmann, 55.

36 Lippmann, 47.

37 Lippmann, 57.

38 Lippmann, 78–79.

39 Lippmann, 13, 71, 88–89.

40 Walter Lippmann, “The Nature of News,” in Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922).

41 Lippmann, Public Opinion.

42 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993).

43 Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan Co., 1929).

44 D. Steven Blum, Walter Lippmann, Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 85–94.

45 Lippmann, Preface, 137.

46 Blum, Cosmopolitanism, 92; Lippmann, Preface, 171.

47 Lippmann, Preface, 239.

48 Walter Lippmann, “On Editorial Writing,” Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, no. 383 (1956), 7.

49 Walter Lippmann to Lincoln Steffens, May 18, 1910, in John Morton Blum, ed., Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985), 6.

50 Walter Lippmann, “News, Truth, and a Conclusion,” in Public Opinion.

51 Schudson, Discovering the News, 150; Steel, Walter Lippmann, 281; Curtis Daniel MacDougall, Interpretative Reporting, 8th ed. (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1982).

52 Walter Lippmann, “On Editorial Writing.”

53 Walter Lippmann, speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1948, Series VI, Box 227, Folder 367, Walter Lippmann Papers, Yale University (henceforth WLP).

54 Walter Lippmann, speech to the National Press Club to celebrate his 70th birthday, September 23, 1959, Series VI, Box 291, Folder 491, WLP.

55 Steel, Walter Lippmann, xv.

56 Franklin Foer, “Why Liberalism Disappoints,” Atlantic, September 2017; Jeremy McCarter, Young Radicals.

57 Snyder, House of Truth, 570; Nation, July 19, 1933, 70; Steel, Walter Lippmann, 210, 221–222.

58 Steel, Walter Lippmann, 8–9.

59 Henry L. Feingold, Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1974); Snyder, House of Truth, 358.

60 Walter Lippmann, “Patriotism in the Rough,” New Republic, October 16, 1915; Henry Hurwitz to Walter Lippmann, Series II, Box 47, Folder 156, WLP.

61 Lippmann to Hurwitz, October 19, 1915; Hurwitz to Lippmann, October 25, Series II, Box 47, Folder 156, WLP.

62 Walter Lippmann, “Public Opinion and the American Jew,” American Hebrew, April 14, 1922, 575.

63 Steel, Walter Lippmann, 6–9, 12–15; Elizabeth Midgley, interview by Matthew Wasniewski, February 28, 2001.

64 Handwritten letter to Lawrence J. Henderson, October 27, 1922, Series I, Box 13, Folder 531; Walter Lippmann to Professor A.N. Holcombe, June 14, 1922, Series I, Box 14, Folder 553, WLP. The letters are reprinted in John Morton Blum, ed., Public Philosopher, 148–154. There is no evidence that Lippmann ever sent the letter to Henderson.

65 Felix Frankfurter to Walter Lippmann, November 28, 1936, Series I, Box 72, Folder 818, WLP.

66 Walter Lippmann, “We Are Wanderers,” Time, December 5, 1938, 19.

67 Lippmann to Lewis Douglas, July 9, 1948, Series III, Box 67, Folder 641, WLP. The letter is reprinted in John Morton Blum, ed., Public Philosopher, 516.

68 Interview with Elizabeth Midgley.

69 Lucas Graves, Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 56. Lucas is citing Ronald May, “Is the Press Unfair to McCarthy?” New Republic, April 1953, and May quoting Houstoun Waring. Waring committed his life to being a small-town editor, of the Littleton Independent of Colorado, but was nevertheless a worldly sage. May was a reporter who co-authored with Jack Anderson a muckraking biography of McCarthy.

70 A search using Google Ngram Viewer reveals use of the term “big lie” in books spiked during the McCarthy years, hitting a peak in 1955. The books typically recount the history of the term with the Nazis. Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that if you are going to lie, lie big. Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels has been credited with asserting that if you lie repeatedly for long enough, people will eventually believe it.

71 Walter Charles Langer and Henry Alexander Murray, “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend,” Office of Strategic Services, 1943.

72 For a more recent example of the claim that a Jewish conspiracy was one of the Nazis’ “big lies,” see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 211. The other big lie attributed to Hitler’s political rise was the “stab-in-the-back-myth,” the idea Germany was on the verge of winning the Great War, but was betrayed by its liberal politicians, “the November criminals,” who capitulated for a peace deal.

73 Blum, Cosmopolitanism, 90, 106.

74 Graves, Deciding What’s True, 52, 53, 56, 88, 91. Regarding the main fact-checking websites, FactCheck.org, Politifact, and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Graves writes, “Their formal policies vary somewhat but converge in prioritizing ‘checkable’ statements by officeholders and political candidates.” On page 91 he explains, “If they differ slightly on who deserves scrutiny, the elite fact-checkers agree emphatically on a basic rule about what can be checked: facts, not opinions. This is a constant refrain.”

75 For the argument that historians have used objectivity to mean different things at different times, see Steven Maras, Objectivity in Journalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1–3, 41. For objectivity rooted in Ancient Greece, see Stephen J. A. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, Second Edition: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond (Chicago: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), 78–88; and Maras, 40. Key histories of journalistic objectivity used for this study include Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979); Knowlton and Freeman, eds., Fair & Balanced; David T. Z. Mindich, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); Schudson, Discovering the News; Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978); and works by James W. Carey, dating back to “The communications revolution and the professional communicator,” Sociological Review 13, no. 1 (1965): 23–38.

76 Scholars have suggested that the first use of the word “objectivity” in journalism appeared in a 1911 textbook by Charles G. Ross, when he wrote: “[n]ews writing is objective to the last degree, in the sense that the writer is not allowed to ‘editorialize’.” See, for example, Hazel Dicken-Garcia, “The Transition from the Partisan to the Penny Press,” in Fair & Balanced, 90. Dicken-Garcia, in turn, is citing Harlan S. Stensaas, “The Rise of Objectivity in U.S. Daily Newspapers, 1865–1934,” (paper presented at the American Journalism Historians Association, St. Louis, October 1986). Stensaas notes that the origins of the term are “hazy at best.” Maurine H. Beasley and Joseph A. Mirando trace journalism textbooks inching toward principle from as early as 1865. See Beasley and Mirando, “Objectivity in Journalism Education,” in Fair & Balanced, 181–182. Douglas B. Ward notes that the term “objectivity” was not commonly used until the 1920s. See Ward, “Readers, Research and Objectivity,” Fair & Balanced, 167. Charles G. Ross is quoted from The Writing of News: A Handbook (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 20.

77 Maras, Objectivity in Journalism, 38–54; David Mindich, Just the Facts, 10–11, 114–115; Schudson, Discovering the News, 6, 77. Maras writes, “My main purpose is to historicize and contextualize objectivity in journalism through discussion of key texts and debates.” He offers an excellent overview of histories of journalistic objectivity, and argues that in the years leading up to and including Lippmann, there were four main periods in U.S. journalism: a “proto-objective” period between 1830—when “news” first developed into a commodity—and 1880; an “objectivity as a reporter-focused organizational and occupational ethic” period from then until 1900; an “objectivity as an informational ethic” phase for the next twenty years, associated with the New York Times; and an “objectivity as an ideal” era that begins around 1920.

78 Maras, Objectivity in Journalism, 52.

79 Schudson, Discovering the News, 157–158; Maras, Objectivity in Journalism, 53. See also Jeremy Iggers, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), 61.

80 Kevin Lerner, “What Conservative Critics Get Right—And Wrong—About the Media,” Washington Post, May 30, 2018.

81 Maras, Objectivity in Journalism, 58–80, 140–151. Maras’ overview of critiques summarized here cites Theodore Glasser, “Objectivity and News Bias,” in Philosophical Issues in Journalism, edited by Elliot D. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 183; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left rev. edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 11–12, 269–270; Hunter S. Thompson, Better than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), 243.

82 Jay Rosen, “The View from Nowhere,” PressThink, November 10, 2010, http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/.

83 Maras, Objectivity in Journalism, 58, citing Everette E. Dennis, Basic Issues in Mass Communication: A Debate (New York: London: Macmillan; Collier Macmillan, 1984), 106. See also, for example, Gans, Deciding What’s News, 39, and Ward, Invention of Journalism Ethics, 336. As Ward notes: “The daily news is full of implicit or explicit value judgments—tales of winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. Reporters cannot avoid evaluative language in reporting on unfair bosses, brutal massacres, vicious murders, notorious pedophiles, and dangerous terrorists.”

84 Ward, Invention of Journalism Ethics, 17, 304, 315–317, 328.

85 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4.

86 John F. Brennan and Lawrence F. Keller, “Pragmatism, The New Republic, and American Public Administration at Its Founding,” Administration & Society 49, no. 4 (2017): 498, 500–503. See also Maras, Objectivity in Journalism, 91.

87 Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “‘A Test of the News’: Some Criticisms,” New Republic, September 8, 1920, 32. See also Schudson, Discovering the News, 154.

88 Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, 61.

89 Steel, Walter Lippmann, 330–331.

90 Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, 34.

91 Ibid, 47.

92 Rosen, “The View from Nowhere.” A current example of emergent ethics would be the work of moral philosopher Peter Singer, whose parents fled the Nazis. Since the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975, Singer has built on the utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart by advocating rights for animals.

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Notes on contributors

Julien Gorbach

Julien Gorbach is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue University Press, 2019).