put edification (as the editor sees it) first and truth second. Mr Lippmann emphasizes perhaps too strongly the theory of direct relation between the certainty of news and the system of record. He lays stress on the fact that reformers attack the press mainly in relation to matter on which precise data are lacking. This is due partly, however, to the interest of reformers in this material, rather than the invulnerability of the press in other respects. There lies on my desk a newspaper generally considered one of the best in America. The heading of a human-interest story asserts that a litter of kittens was drowned. The story itself is absolutely contrary to this statement. Nobody is writing a Brass Check about these kittens, but precisely the same sort of stupidity and carelessness that inspired the copy-reader of this story inspires the garbling and misrepresentation characteristic of many an article on more important subjects. One of the principal faults of journalism is a lazy attitude towards the facts. The reporter or editor is full of confidence instead of information.
From this fault Mr Lippmann himself is not free. He quotes his newspaper statistics from a book eight years old. In Liberty and the News he raises the question whether schools of journalism are trade schools. In Public Opinion, his more recent work, he asserts definitely that they are such, without offering any evidence for his statement. Some of his analogies from the fine arts are dubious. There are a few hardly excusable errors in grammar.
Moreover, though he recognizes the psychopathological factors involved in public opinion, Mr Lippmann does not, in my estimation, attribute enough significance to pathological fear as a cause for substituting subjective opinions for objective facts. The American citizen is intellectually the timidest soul that ever peeped from a rabbit hole. He is willing to stand up and be shot at, but an unpleasant fact fills him with vague dismay while a really disturbing fact gives him the symptoms of hydrophobia.
Nevertheless, Liberty and the News is a volume of great usefulness to any student of journalism, and Public Opinion is one of the few real contributions to political science in recent years. The author is a keen diagnostician. I have confidence, too, in his prescription: the ascertaining of the facts on public matters by unbiased experts. I have not so much confidence that the public will use the prescription. There is too keen a demand for political as well as physical patent medicine.
