On​ 9 February this year, Elon Musk, then in charge of the US Department of Government Efficiency, posted a message on X calling for a number of American media outlets to be closed down. He criticised, among others, the public service broadcaster Voice of America, which began transmission in 1942 with ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. ‘Daily, at this time,’ the station announced, ‘we shall speak to you about America and the war … The news may be good or bad – we shall tell you the truth.’ Since then, VOA has produced content in 83 languages and is one of the few independent sources of information available in China and Iran (it was blocked by Russia in 2022). ‘It’s just radical left crazy people,’ Musk wrote on his platform, ‘talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.’ Donald Trump agreed, and on 14 March placed its employees on administrative leave. Reporters without Borders, VOA and union members filed a lawsuit, and on 22 April Judge Royce Lamberth, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, instructed that the broadcasts be resumed so that VOA could ‘fulfil its statutory mandate’. Late in September he ordered the Trump administration to reverse its sacking of hundreds of VOA employees. Despite this, the liquidation of the organisation continues, with plans to replace its broadcasts with material provided by One America News Network, a right-wing conspiracy station. The administration’s attack dogs are devoted to scolding, ridiculing, banishing and suing media organisations – helped of course when those organisations make errors of judgment. The errors, by the way, are never as severe as Trump’s own, and they always arise from an overzealous wish to expose underlying truths that he wants to deny. Witness, for instance, the roasting of the BBC, a few of whose journalists got sloppy while trying to show an obvious truth, that Trump’s speech of 6 January 2021 was understood by some to be incendiary.

Richard Nixon hated the press and had plenty of rude things to say about Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, but it never occurred to him that he could actually close the paper. John F. Kennedy took a different tack, mugging up on things that individual journalists might like to be praised about. He understood writers’ egos, and major hacks visiting the White House would be greeted by JFK as if they were just the adviser the country needed. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy considered making Walter Lippmann his ambassador to Paris, but Schlesinger told the president he was more useful in the papers. When Lippmann visited the Oval Office on 8 November 1962, Ronald Steel tells us in Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980), Kennedy tried hard to make him feel important. He showed Lippmann the secret messages he and Khrushchev had exchanged during the missile crisis. ‘The president seemed eager,’ Steel reports, ‘to have him understand that the Russians wanted to carry out their part of the bargain.’ A journalist of Lippmann’s magnitude was part of the process, a voice you had to cultivate and perhaps listen to, because it spoke four times a week in the public’s ear and was a fact of democracy.

Lyndon Johnson wanted democracy to come to heel, and to that end spent a lot of time stroking the press. The veteran Lippmann was trouble: he gave Johnson a sore head, mainly because he advertised rather persistently the kind of liberal values that Johnson wanted to believe in but found difficult to cajole into policy. In 1937, long before any talk of LBJ’s Great Society, Lippmann had written a book called The Good Society, and he would define, through six decades of the 20th century, a liberal urban modernity, what that study called ‘the inwardness of the liberal conception of life … the logic of its principle and the grammar of its intuition’. Johnson, no doubt, would have said he had reality as well as principle to deal with as he pushed through legislation (such as the Civil Rights Act) that Kennedy did not live to fight for. In doing this rough work he proved the classic if wily liberal, the man whom his biographer Robert Caro has spent a lifetime revealing as an evildoer for good. ‘He shows himself to be a passionate seeker,’ Lippmann wrote of Johnson in his syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune, ‘with an uncanny gift for finding, beneath public issues, common ground on which men could stand.’ Despite all this, and despite Lippmann’s being generally credited with coming up with the expression ‘Cold War’, he features very sparsely in the first four volumes of Caro’s Life of LBJ.

In any event, Lippmann believed Johnson was listening to him in September 1964. The president had given him the Medal of Freedom, attended Lippmann’s 75th birthday party and provided him with every certainty that he would be seeking a negotiated settlement in Vietnam. Lippmann, in all the pomp of his liberal majesty (unimaginable in a newspaperperson now), then flew to Paris, where he spent time with the president, Charles de Gaulle; the minister of foreign affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville; and the new general secretary of the French Communist Party, Waldeck Rochet. From there, Lippmann flew to Rome, where he met diplomats from the Vatican and leaders of the Italian Communist Party. When he returned, he went to the White House to explain the nature of the European alliance to Johnson and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. These two men had already decided to escalate the war in Vietnam, but they couldn’t bear to tell Lippmann, who had been criss-crossing the globe in support of the opposite. Lippmann was invited again and again by the administration to outline his ‘peace offensive’, but, while they were keeping him sweet, they were laying plans for Operation Rolling Thunder.

‘In order to rationalise, that is to sell, the wider war,’ Lippmann wrote in his column on 30 March 1965, ‘we are being told by Secretary McNamara and others that this war is a decisive test for the future. It will decide the future of “wars of liberation”. This is a profoundly and dangerously false notion, and it shows a lamentable lack of knowledge and understanding of the revolutionary upheavals of the epoch in which we live.’ Lippmann was right to see imperial overreach as the problem for American foreign policy that just wouldn’t go away. We will have to wait for Caro’s final volume to find out what he has discovered from the Oval Office recordings, but we already know Lippmann could send Johnson into a rage over his cornflakes. ‘Traitorous, irrational or senile’, he called him, according to Steel. ‘A political commentator of yesteryear’.

Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book Public Opinion, published in 1922. In a way that we might find startlingly relevant today, the book posits that modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’ (such representations might explain Nigel Farage). Individual citizens cling to their fictional environments so thoroughly, Lippmann argued, that they could be living in different worlds from those who don’t share them. ‘More accurately,’ he writes, ‘they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones … [and] these fictions determine a very great part of men’s political behaviour.’ Lippmann is said to have been the first person to use the word ‘stereotype’ in its modern application, and in Public Opinion he considers the way we seek to have our most beloved fictions reinforced in the public sphere:

If the newspaper gives a satisfactory account of that which we think we know … it is fairly certain to be immune from violent criticism by us. What better criterion does the man at the breakfast table possess than that the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion? Therefore, most men tend to hold the newspaper most strictly accountable in their capacity, not of general readers, but of special pleaders on matters of their own experience … The body of the news, though unchecked as a whole by the disinterested reader, consists of items about which some readers have very definite preconceptions. Those items are the data of his judgment, and news which men read without this personal criterion, they judge by some other standard than their standard of accuracy. They are dealing here with a subject matter which to them is indistinguishable from fiction. The canon of truth cannot be applied. They do not boggle over such news if it conforms to their stereotypes.

People reading newspapers, Lippmann observed, were not offended by stories of unfairness and corruption, they were offended by what those stories said about themselves, and taking public events personally proved habit-forming over the 20th century and into the 21st. If you look at the coverage of terrible events that gave rise to a disquiet about the play of fact and fiction in their reporting – from the Soviet famine to Vietnam, from the Falklands conflict to the Grenfell Tower fire – you can feel the imprint of Lippmann’s definition of enhanced opinion and manipulated fact. ‘For one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer girl … In that subservience … is the reason why American journalism is so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.’ At his peak, Lippmann was writing on three or four subjects a week; he believed, as Tom Arnold-Forster puts it in his biography, that ‘journalism was a vocation with political responsibilities to inform public opinion and help democracy function.’ Lippmann did recognise the increasing capacity of people to select their own facts, a trend which faces us with a large question. As Arnold-Forster puts it: ‘If lying journalism defined the public sphere, was democracy really free?’

In a career involving millions of words and spanning sixty years, Lippmann only had writer’s block once, when he tried to write a memoir. His first memory, aged four, was of the financial crisis of 1893, and he became a theorist of causes and effects, of reporting and public opinion and the possibility of common decency in a corporate society. At Harvard, he was, at different times, an assistant and acolyte to William James and George Santayana, and he came to believe that reality was something one had to fight for, that personality and expertise had their parts to play, and that ‘psychology mattered in politics.’ He wanted to see what the papers were saying but also why they were saying it, something that becomes clear in a study published as a supplement to the New Republic in 1920. Lippmann and Charles Merz, both editors at the magazine (Lippmann had helped found it), attempted to evaluate the New York Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution, studying more than a thousand issues of the paper published between 1917 and 1920. ‘The investigators came up with some bitter conclusions,’ David Weingast wrote in 1950:

They found the Times guilty of having misled its readers on one of the most stupendous events in modern history. The paper had failed in its primary responsibility to publish accurate, reliable information. Whatever its purpose, the Times had not given its readers even the core of established facts on which intelligent judgment could be based. The two analysts saw as a ‘fundamental task’ of the 20th century the supplying of accurate news. It was imperative, they wrote, that the newspaper industry police itself. It would have to establish a code of honour and enforce it. Almost three decades later the Commission on Freedom of the Press, after an elaborate and costly study, proposed reforms that strikingly paralleled those suggested by Lippmann and Merz. In the fullness of time Charles Merz has himself come to be editor of the New York Times, and Walter Lippmann is recognised as the dean of America’s serious columnists.

By this point, Lippmann was hated by right-wing populists, ridiculed by the likes of William F. Buckley for being a Cold War liberal; yet he was, for all that, a true believer in what America imagined it stood for. He ‘saw American power through a politics of empire’, Arnold-Forster writes. ‘He was ideologically committed to imperialism and framed global dominance as “The American Destiny” from 1938 to 1941. He then helped naturalise US empire as “world leadership” from 1942 to 1945. On a world scale, Lippmann’s liberalism was fully compatible with these imperial commitments. Indeed his imperialism was bound up with both his internationalism and his realism.’ Fatal compromise and fatal realism can sometimes be hard to tell apart, especially now, but journalistic dexterity depends less on the ability to please your friends, or your party, than on your ability to maintain a healthy level of ambivalence about most things. ‘What kills political writing,’ Lippmann wrote, was the ‘absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes on what you think.’

The tone of his thinking feels contemporary, notes towards the supreme fiction we are now living with. (I don’t believe Lippmann ever met Wallace Stevens, but I imagine they would have had a lot to say to each other. Stevens, his senior by ten years, thought that ‘reality is an activity of the most august imagination.’) ‘For Lippmann, the problem of representation was ultimately not so much political as epistemological,’ John Patrick Diggins wrote in 1991 in an essay in Political Theory:

In Public Opinion, he suggested that the political misinformation plaguing the American people might be corrected by a bureau of experts capable of screening and organising the news to make it more intellectually responsible. By the time he wrote The Phantom Public three years later, Lippmann doubted that the ‘medium of fictions’ that kept people from understanding the external world could be penetrated. No one, neither administrative experts enlightened by scientific intelligence nor the masses moved by interests, neither the few nor the many, can claim a privileged grasp of the objective truth about the public good. America, it seemed, left political man where Machiavelli had found him, a private creature whose ‘visions could never be corrected.’ The res publica commanding citizens and directing the course of events is a ‘phantom’.

Lippmann had started out in the era of muckraking, when journalism was a hotbed of scandal-making and intolerance. He understood that a news organisation, whether good or bad, is a political institution. ‘Daily journalism may become the special province of the neurotic partisan,’ Lippmann’s early mentor Graham Wallas had written, ‘whose emotions can be trusted to react immediately to the weakest stimulus.’ (I give thanks that neither Wallas nor Lippmann lived to enjoy Elon Musk’s X.) Yet for all the smoke-filled rooms around and inside him, Lippmann distinguished himself by having a terrific sense of metaphor, a radiant writing style and a clear instinct for the consequences of powerful men’s actions on those who live without power. He included the actions of powerful editors and newspapermen – indeed, Lippmann was one of the first to explore what we would now call the ethics of journalism. ‘News and truth are not the same thing,’ he wrote in Public Opinion, ‘and must be clearly distinguished.’ And what could seem metaphysical and dry in his more lugubrious books of the 1940s and 1950s boiled down easily in his columns to questions of fairness, logic and human decency. ‘When the Titanic sank,’ Arnold-Forster quotes Lippmann saying, ‘it was very noticeable that the anguish of the first-class passengers meant more to the newspapers than did that of the crew or steerage.’ He wanted the good journalist to raid the territory behind the headlines. ‘Lippmann is still absolutist enough,’ Robert E. Park wrote in the American Journal of Sociology in 1922, ‘to assume that there is, somewhere, a Fact with a capital F, a fact in other words that can be so completely and accurately stated as to have for every individual, at any time and under all circumstances, one and only one meaning.’

Arnold-Forster’s​ book is not taken up with Lippmann’s workaday experience with leaders, or his life as a man of influence, but instead synthesises the worlds and arguments inside his head. Leaving the biographical spadework to the rest of us, the book does what it says on the tin: it’s an intellectual biography, well timed for our own period’s tussles with democracy, free speech and new ways of mobilising public opinion. But Lippmann was early to the table when it came to explaining that reality is not a choice one might make, not a thing to opt in and out of as suits your self-interest, but a bulwark against propaganda and censorship, the essential currency of a free press. In Liberty and the News, he anatomised a problem that is even more evident a hundred years later. Could ‘government by consent … survive’, he asked, ‘in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise?’* ‘This was the “exact sense”,’ Arnold-Forster writes, ‘in which Lippmann claimed that “the present crisis of Western democracy is a crisis in journalism.”’ Arnold-Forster leaves us to see how this might apply not only to Lippmann’s Cold War era, but also to our own.

Whether or not the state was at war, ‘the news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumour, suspicion, clues, hopes and fears,’ Lippmann wrote, ‘and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy,’ he stressed, ‘the book out of which a people determines its conduct.’

Lippmann wasn’t alone in these arguments. Upton Sinclair, an altogether more rabble-rousing and pugnacious character, in 1919 published The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism, which produced contradictory waves of repulsion and assent. I checked, and the book had ten editions before 1928, selling 144,000 copies, exclusive of translations, and this despite many newspapers, including the New York Times, refusing advertisements for it. ‘The thesis of this book,’ Sinclair wrote,

is that our newspapers do not represent public interests, but private interests; they do not represent humanity, but property; they value a man, not because he is great, or good, or wise, or useful, but because he is wealthy, or of service to vested wealth … Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters. Not hyperbolically and contemptuously, but literally and with scientific precision, we define journalism in America as the business and practice of presenting the news of the day in the interest of economic privilege.

Again, I can only give thanks that he never met Jeff Bezos, the present owner of the Washington Post, which recently ran an editorial headlined ‘In Defence of the White House Ballroom’ (Bezos happens to be one of those paying for the golden edifice). In backrooms as in ballrooms, in real life as in farce, it is not always possible to see what kind of too much is too much, but journalism is supposed to be able to tell. For Sinclair and the more clubbable Lippmann, ‘mankind will not consent to be lied to indefinitely,’ while for others in the period, T.S. Eliot for instance, ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality.’ In The Method of Freedom (1934), Lippmann suggested that America should tax the rich and build schools but Eliot, reviewing the book, called it ‘a rotten cultural product of liberal social decay’ and took the position, as Arnold-Forster parses it, that ‘secular liberals were latently totalitarian.’

Bernard Levin is reported to have said that a good columnist should get your engine started in the morning. Lippmann wasn’t all that interested in mobs or demagogues – he knew that anything was sayable within self-protecting ‘speech environments’. His biggest argument was that liberty should never be a matter of one man feeling free to say one thing. ‘Truly free speech meant something more than lawful toleration of individual speakers,’ Arnold-Forster says. ‘It meant cultivating media institutions and political environments that ideally sustained an engaged and critical public opinion. For Lippmann, democratic liberty was lost or found in the public debates that shaped opinion formation.’ He knew that individuals – and cults of the individual – could become perniciously lost in their own pseudo-environments and their own justifications, losing touch with objective reality. He always worried that fictions and false pictures might ‘flood the whole consciousness’, making the world unreal. And he didn’t trust the average Joe to make sense of it by himself: in that respect, he distrusted the masses.

Lippmann had his critics, not least H.L. Mencken, described by the historian David Greenberg as ‘the literary slasher for the Baltimore Sun’, who found Public Opinion laborious and cod-mystical. According to Mencken, Lippmann’s view is that ‘we must keep on hoping that the mob will one day grow intelligent.’ Another critic, Edward E. Hunt, objected to his ‘annoyingly Olympian attitude’; he was hardly ‘a Manhattan Zeus’ but, as Lippmann himself put it, ‘merely a writer with an acute international anxiety neurosis’. The labour writer Benjamin Stolberg argued that Lippmann’s politics were ‘a liberal apology for prevailing conditions, not the kind of critique that could produce a different world’. Yet the New York Herald Tribune sold him as ‘the Spokesman of American Liberalism’, and, at his height, he was syndicated to more than a hundred newspapers with a collective readership of ten million readers. When he wrote US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic in the spring of 1943, it was condensed in Reader’s Digest and the Ladies’ Home Journal. In popular culture, he provided the image of a smart person perpetually raining expertise on the congenitally distracted. In a San Francisco nightclub in the film Pal Joey (1957), the former stripper played by Rita Hayworth sings: ‘Zip! Walter Lippmann wasn’t brilliant today.’

Perhaps he was a man of the 20th century in constant argument with the 19th, a commentor dismayed by the notion that science and technology appeared to have improved mankind for the worse. His modernity could rely on some old optics. ‘Lippmann had long seen international relations through the lens of empire,’ Arnold-Forster writes. ‘He saw the ultimate end of US foreign policy as the realisation of universal order through American power.’ Yet by the mid-1960s the man who had argued for presidential power – ‘the public acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of someone in a position to act executively’ – saw he was mired in an argument with anti-Soviet Cold Warriors agitating for American dominance. If you read Lippmann’s columns in the era of ‘duck and cover’, of threatened nuclear annihilation, you find a man suddenly opposed to any sort of ‘ideological crusade’, who saw Soviet expansionism as a feature of Russianness, as opposed to communism, a matter on which he has been proved correct.

The escalation in Vietnam seemed almost like a personal catastrophe to Lippmann. It brought the curtain down on his influence, but also on his hopes for a truly liberal America. He was one of those who had helped create a daily appetite for America’s stately ambitions, including ambitions for its journalism, and yet, when the overreach came, bringing a war that was manifestly created by liberals and cheered on by conservatives, he seemed to be a man who had arrived at an overreach of his own. Never bellicose, he saw the war as a disaster for the liberal consensus in America, and long before the burning of draft cards, he seemed to be a lone voice against the direction taken by the US. The man at the typewriter, the popular philosopher of liberty, was finally at a standstill. It was a crisis of politics itself, and he dreaded what might be coming. ‘We are suffering not from communism and radicalism but from nihilism,’ he wrote in one of his later columns.

Appearing on television in 1967 to be quizzed by a group of students, Lippmann, rheumy-eyed, wearing a grey suit and a claret-coloured tie, approaches their questions with friendly tolerance, finally admitting that the period they are living through is the worst he’s ever known. ‘What I see is the disintegration of morale,’ he says, before outlining what he feels have been the great periods for change, the ‘Elizabethan’ moments, such as the New Deal and Kennedy’s presidential campaign. What he loves most, he says, is the sense that problems are really capable of being tackled. His fingers stroke the air and one imagines the typewriter keys he had been tapping his whole writing life. He believed with every last thing he had that journalism could make a difference. ‘It really is the fascinating way to live,’ he says.