Zack Shapiro

Walter Lippmann - Liberty and the News (1920)

90 years later, in a world on 24-hour news networks, do Lippmann’s words still hold true? Are journalists still sacred gatekeepers to the world of facts?

No they aren’t.

The problem in our society is a rather laughable paradox: we are both starved for news and inundated with it at the very same time. There are local nightly newscasts on TV, newspapers, and blogs; there 24-hour news channels, tweets to follow, celebrities to check up on, and magazines to read. We can’t get enough news yet we have too much to choose from. News has given way to entertainment. Where we begin and how we evaluate what’s credible and vital to our task of making informed decisions is fundamentally different from what it was in 1920.

In Lippmann’s era, 90 percent of the news that is reported today would be left on the editing room floor or laughed out the door. As reporting strictly on the facts has given way to reporting for ratings and views on Google Analytics, the truth isn’t as important anymore. What’s more important now is the latest rumor or half-truth. What will drive viewers to a particular news website, TV channel, or blog today?

An ideal example of how modern journalists have lost their “priestly offices,” as Lippmann said, can be found by looking at the Lie of the Year for 2009: Sarah Palin and the alleged death panels found in Congress’s Health Care Reform Act bill.

A 1920‘s journalist would sift through the information available and ultimately report on Sarah Palin’s scare tactics for what they were. They would point out her ignorance and her misunderstanding of the bill’s goals while reporting on what the bill actually contained. While news organizations on the political left did in fact do just that, their reporting of the facts became fodder for the right-wing news organizations who continued to spin the story and promote Palin’s agenda.

In Lippmann’s era news organizations didn’t exist at polar ends of the political spectrum. It wasn’t the journalist’s job to spin a story or report it in a skewed fashion. Reporters were to inform the public, wading through the “medley of facts, propaganda and rumors” to determine the truths of the story and nothing more. Somewhere in the past 90 years (most likely in the past 30 years) the propaganda and rumors began to make their way into the news. As Thomas Wolfe said in the title of his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.

What was once the journalist’s job, determining the truth, is now the viewer’s job, the reader’s job, the listener’s job. Our one lane highway of news consumption has grown exponentially and now it’s on us to separate reality from entertainment, shock for the sure thing.

Walter Lippmann would be disappointed in our world today. He would be disappointed in our laziness and our greed. He would argue against news-around-the-clock and for the luxury of time to prepare factual stories that journalists used to hold dear. More news isn’t such a great thing after all. With so many outlets mis-reporting information for ratings and advertising capital, we may be less informed than we were 90 years ago.