Walter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter, and political commentator.

From 1896 Lippmann attended the Sachs School for Boys, followed by the Sachs Collegiate Institute, an elite and strictly secular private school in the German Gymnasium tradition, attended primarily by children of German-Jewish families and run by the classical philologist Julius Sachs, a son-in-law of Marcus Goldmann from the Goldman-Sachs family.

Classes included 11 hours of ancient Greek and 5 hours of Latin per week.

In 1911, Lippmann served as secretary to George R. Lunn, the first Socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, during Lunn's first term.

Lippmann resigned his post after four months, finding Lunn's programs to be worthwhile in and of themselves, but inadequate as socialism.

In 1913, Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl became the founding editors of The New Republic.

During World War I, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in the Army on June 28, 1918, and was assigned to the intelligence section of the AEF headquarters in France.

He was assigned to the staff of Edward M. House in October and attached to the American Commission to negotiate peace in December.

He returned to the United States in February 1919 and was immediately discharged.

Through his connection to House, Lippmann became an adviser to Wilson and assisted in the drafting of Wilson's Fourteen Points speech.

He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information.

While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had "no doctrinaire belief in free speech," he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression."

Lippmann examined the coverage of newspapers and saw many inaccuracies and other problems.

Lippmann was a journalist, a media critic and an amateur philosopher who tried to reconcile the tensions between liberty and democracy in a complex and modern world, as in his 1920 book Liberty and the News.

He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution was biased and inaccurate.

In addition to his newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow", he wrote several books.

With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion.

Lippmann also played a notable role as research director of Woodrow Wilson's post-World War I board of inquiry.

His views on the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann-Dewey debate.

Lippmann was the first to bring the phrase "cold war" to a common currency, in his 1947 book by the same name.

It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas.

He argued that people, including journalists, are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than to come to judgment by critical thinking.

Humans condense ideas into symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public.

Even if journalists did better jobs of informing the public about important issues, Lippmann believed "the mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation."

Citizens, he wrote, were too self-centered to care about public policy except as pertaining to pressing local issues.

Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khrushchev.

He has also been highly praised with titles ranging from "most influential" journalist of the 20th century to "Father of Modern Journalism".

Michael Schudson writes that James W. Carey considered Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion as "the founding book of modern journalism" and also "the founding book in American media studies".

Lippmann was born on New York's Upper East Side as the only child of Jewish parents of German origin.

According to his biographer Ronald Steel, he grew up in a "gilded Jewish ghetto".

His father Jacob Lippmann was a rentier who had become wealthy through his father's textile business and his father-in-law's real estate speculation.

His mother, Daisy Baum, cultivated contacts in the highest circles, and the family regularly spent its summer holidays in Europe.

The family had a Reform Jewish orientation; averse to "orientalism", they attended Temple Emanu-El.

Walter had his Reform Jewish confirmation instead of the traditional Bar Mitzvah at the age of 14.

Lippmann was emotionally distanced from both parents, but had closer ties to his maternal grandmother.

The political orientation of the family was Republican.

Shortly before his 17th birthday, he entered Harvard University where he wrote for The Harvard Crimson and studied under George Santayana, William James, and Graham Wallas, concentrating upon philosophy and languages (he spoke German and French).

He took only one course in history and one in government.

He was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society, though important social clubs rejected Jews as members.

Lippmann became a member, alongside Sinclair Lewis, of the New York Socialist Party.