Propaganda and Public Opinion: Lippmann and Lasswell

Story

Crustaceans in a bowl, and “public opinion”

On 12 July 1918 a New York newspaper described the propagandist’s job like this: to the trained propagandist, the public mind is a pool into which words and thoughts are dropped “like acids”, with the reactions known in advance. Just as Professor Loeb can drop a little chemical into a bowl, stop a thousand crustaceans swimming aimlessly and make them all rush towards the light.

We can read that scene today because Lasswell quotes it in his 1927 book Propaganda Technique in the World War, taking it from a booklet of the US Military Intelligence. But he does not present it as his own theory. He cites it as the “all-knowing” quality a newspaper had imputed to the propagandist, and writes that only if methods of testing before circulation can be devised will the propagandist come somewhat closer to it. In other words, the book itself knows how far the caricature is from reality.

This lesson reads two books side by side. One is Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922): why do the pictures in people’s heads not fit the world? The other is Lasswell’s (1927): how does somebody get his hands on those pictures? At the end of the road there is also an answer to both: John Dewey’s 1927 book.

Card

The war ended, the word stayed

One of the first pages of Lasswell’s book catches the mood of the time in a single sentence: a word has appeared, and it has come to have “an ominous clang” in many minds: propaganda. People are uneasy about an unknown cunning that seems to have duped and degraded them.

The state’s counterpart of that unease, in the United States, was the Committee on Public Information. It was set up by executive order on 13 April 1917, chaired by George Creel, and abolished on 21 August 1919. You will meet the details in A History of Propaganda.

Both authors’ ties to the war are documented. During the war Lippmann was executive secretary of the secret research group (the Inquiry) that prepared the ground for Wilson’s Fourteen Points; he was also commissioned as a captain in military intelligence to carry out propaganda on the western front. Lasswell devoted a whole book to war propaganda. In his opening pages he says that the newcomers to the propaganda, or “publicity”, profession have begun to write down their own practices, and that the books by Bernays and by Wilder and Buell are pioneers in this direction. (You will get to know Bernays and Creel better in other lessons.)

In short: the books of 1922 and 1927 were written in a world where propaganda was both feared and turning into a profession.

Card

Who, and when?

Keep three authors and four dates in mind.

• Walter Lippmann (1889–1974): journalist and commentator. Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).
• Harold Lasswell (1902–1978): political scientist. Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927).
• John Dewey (1859–1952): philosopher. He wrote favourable reviews of Lippmann’s two books in The New Republic (1922 and 1925); the lectures he gave in 1926 were published in 1927 as The Public and Its Problems.

The birth years also help fix the order: Dewey was born thirty years before Lippmann (1859), Lasswell thirteen years after him (1902); so there is a span of forty-three years among the three authors.

Memory hook: 1922 picture, 1925 phantom, 1927 technique and reply.

Later names: Bernays’s article “The Engineering of Consent” in 1947; Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent in 1988; Schudson’s article questioning the “Lippmann–Dewey debate” in 2008. In this lesson Bernays, Herman and Chomsky appear only as names.

Myth check

The picture takes the world’s place

What people assume. Public opinion is the sum of what people think after seeing the world as it is.

Lippmann’s move. You can state it in one sentence: the political world is “out of reach, out of sight, out of mind”; it has to be explored, reported and imagined. So we respond to it with the picture in our heads. (You read the islanders’ 1914 scene and the chapter title “the pictures in our heads” in Agenda-Setting; we do not repeat them here.)

Then he draws a distinction: the pictures people carry in their heads about themselves, about others, about their needs, purposes and relationships are their public opinions. Those pictures that are acted upon by groups, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are “Public Opinion with capital letters”. So Lippmann defines public opinion not as a poll total or the will of the people, but as pictures turned into action. Our interpretation: the distinction is useful because the question “what does the public think?” can mix up two different things: are you asking about the pictures in people’s heads, or about the ones that turn into action?

The book’s big worry comes from here: democratic theory, in its original form, never seriously faced the problem that the pictures in our heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside. Turkish studies refer to the book as Kamuoyu.

Myth check

Propaganda is not every kind of pressure

What people assume. Propaganda is everything done in wartime to bring a society into line: restrictions, bans, even food rations.

The definition in Lasswell’s 1927 book. Propaganda is a matter of “the control of opinion by significant symbols”; to put it more concretely and less accurately, of stories, rumours, reports, pictures and other forms of social communication. It is the management of opinions and attitudes by the direct manipulation of social suggestion, rather than by altering conditions in the environment or in the organism. He draws the boundary deliberately: raising morale by changing objective conditions, such as increasing the cigarette ration or changing the chemical composition of food, is not counted as propaganda. He also writes that the problem of maintaining morale is only in part a problem of propaganda: propaganda is but one of many devices, and its scope is “limited though important”.

Nor is propaganda the only instrument. Lasswell names three chief instruments against an enemy: military pressure, economic pressure and propaganda. In the chapter on the results of propaganda he says the war is fought on three fronts (military, economic, propaganda) and calls propaganda “a passive and contributory weapon”; its chief function is to demolish the enemy’s will to fight.

Card

Glossary: pictures, not lies

• Pseudo-environment pseudo-environment: the representation that comes between a person and the real environment, and to which behaviour responds. Lippmann warns: “By fictions I do not mean lies”.
• Stereotype stereotype: the ready-made pattern our culture supplies, which lets us define first and see afterwards.
• Public opinions and Public Opinion in capital letters: the pictures in heads, and those acted upon by groups. (For Noelle-Neumann’s notion of public opinion see public opinion.)
• The omnicompetent citizen: the citizen democratic theory presupposes, competent and interested in every question. For Lippmann this assumption is roughly true, at most, in a small village.
• Organized intelligence: Lippmann’s proposed remedy: independent expert bureaus that show decision-makers the facts they cannot see.
• Manufacture of consent manufacture of consent: the phrase Lippmann used in 1922; its later uses are a separate story.
• The phantom public the phantom public: Lippmann’s name, in 1925, for the idea of a public that steers events.
• The propagandist as technician the propagandist as technician: this lesson’s shorthand; not Lasswell’s own term.
• The Lippmann–Dewey debate the Lippmann–Dewey debate: a story constructed in the 1980s.
• Concepts from other lessons: hypodermic needle (magic bullet) model, powerful effects assumption, Lasswell’s formula (the subject of 1948; not in this lesson).

Trap: a pseudo-environment does not mean “lies invented by the media”.

Myth check

Lippmann did not say “the people are stupid”

What people assume. Lippmann was an elitist who thought the people incompetent and wanted to hand government over to experts.

What the record says. The book’s own sentence: “every one of us is an outsider”, that is, except in a few aspects of modern life; the outsider has neither time, nor attention, nor interest, nor the equipment for specific judgment. In Schudson’s reading, “incompetence” is a property of a position, not of a person; the real target is the doctrine of the omnicompetent citizen, which treats the citizen as competent in every matter. Lippmann even grants that this doctrine is, for practical purposes, true for the village; the problem is applying the village’s picture to a complicated civilisation.

His remedy is not “let the experts rule” either. Intelligence bureaus show decision-makers the facts they cannot see; the aim is not to load expert opinion onto every citizen’s shoulders but to “push that burden away from him towards the responsible administrator”. But Schudson also admits that Lippmann trusted experts too much: “Yes, of course”.

Card

The spectator who arrives in the middle of the third act

In 1925 Lippmann went further. In the opening image of The Phantom Public the private citizen is like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery on stage but cannot manage to stay awake. In the sixth chapter he speaks plainly: the belief in a public that directs the course of events he answers with “a mere phantom”. The public is not a fixed body of individuals; it is those persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only by supporting or opposing the actors.

Look at how he imagines this public: it arrives in the middle of the third act and leaves before the last curtain, staying just long enough to decide who is the hero and who the villain. So the public’s job is not to write policy or judge the details but to intervene occasionally in the actors’ work: to take sides for or against.

This is not giving up on democracy. Dewey described the book as “a statement of faith in a pruned and temperate democratic theory” (as Schudson quotes him). Lippmann does not abandon democracy; he lowers what we expect of it.

Step by step

How does an event reach our heads? (according to Lippmann)

1. The event is far away. The political world is “out of reach, out of sight, out of mind”. It has to be explored, reported and imagined.
2. Access narrows. In the introduction Lippmann lists the limits: artificial censorships, limited social contact, the small amount of time and attention in a day, events compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and the fear of facing facts that threaten the established routine (chapters II–V unpack these).
3. News arrives drop by drop. What comes from outside is, in Lippmann’s phrase, a “trickle of messages”: a thin leak of messages.
4. Stereotypes fill the gap. We define first and see afterwards; the stereotype our culture supplies completes the missing piece (chapter VI).
5. Stereotypes fuse with interests. The pattern of stereotypes is identified with the person’s own interests (the “interests” part of the book, XI–XII).
6. The group acts on the picture. The consequences of behaviour appear not in the pseudo-environment where the picture is, but in the real environment where the action takes place.
7. Collision. The mismatch between picture and world ends in the sensation of “butting one’s head against a stone wall”: the price of the error is paid in the real environment.

This is not an injection: in front of the message there are limits of access, behind it stereotypes and interests, and at the end the real environment.

Step by step

Lasswell’s streetcar

Lasswell describes how propaganda works not as an abstract “effect” but as a to-do list. The steps we follow in the book are these:

1. Choose the aim. There are four strategic aims: to mobilise hatred against the enemy; to preserve the friendship of allies; to preserve the friendship and, if possible, procure the co-operation of neutrals; to demoralise the enemy.
2. Know the audience. Every special group tends to make the war over in its own image; the propagandist’s task is usually “to facilitate, rather than to fabricate”.
3. Fit the suggestion to the group. You can tell Protestants that the war is a great Protestant crusade and Catholics that it is a great Catholic movement; but to mix the two appeals to the same audience would be absurd. Self-contradiction in the same context is avoided.
4. Find the carrier. People riding a streetcar can be influenced by placards inside the car, by posters on billboards along the track, by the newspapers they read, by conversations they overhear, by leaflets slipped into their hands and by street demonstrations at halting places.
5. Put yourself in the audience’s place. The soundest method is to identify yourself imaginatively with the people to be influenced and to explore every avenue of approach to their attention; after that each situation is tested for its own possibilities.

Story

Forty experts, twenty seconds

To show how stereotypes fill the eye, Lippmann tells of an experiment he takes from a French book cited by another author. A congress of psychologists is meeting in Göttingen. Somewhere near the hall there is a masked ball. Suddenly the door flies open: a clown rushes in, madly pursued by a man with a revolver. They fight in the middle of the room, the clown falls, the man fires, and both rush out. The whole incident lasts about twenty seconds.

The president asks everyone to write a report at once, since there will certainly be a judicial inquiry. Forty reports come in. Only one contains less than 20 per cent of mistakes on the principal facts; fourteen have 20 to 40 per cent, twelve 40 to 50, thirteen more than 50. In twenty-four accounts about 10 per cent of the details are pure invention; in ten accounts the proportion is higher, in six lower. Then the surprise: the whole scene had been arranged and even photographed in advance.

Lippmann’s reading: these people are not lying; they saw a scene that did not take place, because they had a ready-made pattern of a brawl in their heads and those images flickered before their eyes. That is what he means by a stereotype.

One limit: this is a single staged event, reported at second hand. Lippmann uses it not as a measurement but as an example that brings the concept to life. Let us read it that way too.

Card

Two books, two kinds of material

Neither book was written in a laboratory; their materials differ.

Lippmann. Examples, footnotes on the psychology of witnesses, and scenes from history. About Clemenceau, one of the great men who gathered in Paris to settle the peace, he asks: did he have in his mind images of the Europe of 1919, or the “German type” he had learned to see since 1871?. So the evidence is not data that measures a generalisation, but a case that invites the reader to recognise the stereotype.

Lasswell. Documents. The note on bibliography divides the material into headings; under “the technique of influencing international attitudes, during and since the war” it lists memoirs, wartime publications and Senate hearings: the memoirs of Bernstorff and Ludendorff, Creel’s How We Advertised America (1920) and the 1919 US Military Intelligence booklet Propaganda in its Military and Legal Aspects (the publication from which the “acid” quotation of the first card is taken). In the text he writes that if “methods of prior testing” can be devised the propagandist will be more accurate; this points to the fact that such testing did not yet exist (our reading).

Afterwards. Later studies did test Lippmann’s suspicion: McCombs and Shaw’s 1972 article used his term, and Iyengar and colleagues’ 1982 experiments reported that they supported the suspicion. Details in Agenda-Setting.

Myth check

A duel that never took place

What people assume. In the 1920s Lippmann and Dewey were two rivals locked in an exchange of articles: one an elitist, the other a democrat.

What the record says. According to Schudson, the “debate” consists of the following: Dewey’s favourable reviews in The New Republic of Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), and The Public and Its Problems, delivered as lectures in 1926 and published in 1927. To Schudson’s knowledge Lippmann never replied to Dewey afterwards, and contemporaries did not read the reviews as a notable confrontation. Those who made it a “debate” afterwards were the liberal intellectuals of the 1980s and 1990s, looking for an origin story at a time of disillusion with democracy; James Carey’s influence was large. Jansen says the same: the two were not opposing sides in a great public debate; the conversation about the “phantom” public was reframed as a conflict in the early 1980s, and that frame rests on a casual rhetorical trope, not on documentation.

Dewey’s own attitude was not a duel either: in 1922 he praises the book; in 1925 he receives The Phantom Public favourably but critically, and hints that the democratic theory Lippmann attacked may be a caricature.

Card

Dewey’s reply: not a phantom, an eclipse

Dewey did not reject Lippmann; he acknowledged his debt. A footnote in his 1927 book says he owes Lippmann’s two books a debt not only on one point but for ideas. He shares the diagnosis: the public seems to be lost, it is “certainly bewildered”. But the name he gives it differs: the public is not a phantom, it is in eclipse: “the Public will remain in eclipse”, and the way out is “Communication can alone create a great community”. So the remedy is not to shrink the public but to repair communication.

On experts the two men are closer than you might think. Dewey defines the job of expertise not as making and executing policy but as “discovering and making known” the facts on which decisions depend. Lippmann’s intelligence bureaus also produce facts, not policy. The difference is in who receives the facts: in Lippmann, the decision-makers. In Dewey the essential need is “the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion”; that is “the problem of the public”. Not everyone has to do research; it is enough that people can judge the bearing of the knowledge experts supply on their own concerns.

What they share: neither takes public opinion to be knowledgeable by itself. Where they part: one looks for the solution in improving the work of the insiders, the other in improving the information that reaches the public.

Myth check

How do the two books connect to the “hypodermic” story?

What people assume. As you saw in The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model, textbooks tell the 1920s–30s as “first everyone thought the media very powerful”, and Lippmann and Lasswell are two of the examples most often given for that story: the media act directly on the receiver.

What the record says. We do not repeat the bullet story here; we only add three things that come from inside the two books.

1. Lippmann’s mechanism is not an injection. In front of the message there are limits of access, behind it stereotypes and interests, and at the end the real environment: people act on the pseudo-environment but the consequences appear in the real environment.
2. Lasswell’s weapon is “passive and contributory”. The propagandist’s job is usually to facilitate the group’s existing inclinations.
3. Even so, the image of “propaganda is very powerful” really was in circulation. Like the crustaceans in the bowl. According to Parsons, the suggestion doctrine was one of the dominant theories of media influence before the war; Pooley calls the “powerful to limited” story “textbook boilerplate”; Sproule examines why reading the interwar propaganda critics as “magic bullet” theorists is historically mistaken.

Our interpretation (not documented): the label “founding books” sticks in hindsight; the two books’ own sentences describe a strong but conditional effect.

Card

The screen you scroll is also an environment

Carrying Lippmann’s framework to the present does not mean saying “social media is bad”; it means asking three questions again: Who is reporting the distant event? Which limits narrow your access? Which stereotype in your head is filling the gap?

There are two documented pieces of information. First: Iyengar, Peters and Kinder’s two experiments showed that television news profoundly affects which problems viewers take to be important; the authors presented this as sustaining Lippmann’s suspicion of half a century earlier. Second: a study of 4,262 trending topics on Twitter found that more than 85 per cent of the topics were “headline news” or “persistent news”, that is, news-related. So most of the agenda on your screen is an echo of a news picture drawn by somebody else.

(A hypothetical try-out.) In your feed there is a ten-second video of an event in a distant city. Ask the three questions: Who filmed it, and how do you know? Which context can you not see? Into which ready-made pattern did you place the footage?

Our interpretation (not documented): the feed algorithm adds one more selector to the limits Lippmann listed (time, attention, speed). So the gap between the pseudo-environment and the real environment does not narrow by itself; it may be only who draws the picture that changes.

Lab

Lab: the pseudo-environment in the Mars “panic”

Put on Lippmann’s glasses for a documented news case: the 1938 Mars broadcast you read about in The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model. Ask three questions.

1. What was the picture? The newspapers’ “panic” story the next day. According to Pooley and Socolow, the papers had a stake in using that story against radio.
2. What was the real environment? According to the same source, in Hooper’s national survey only 2 per cent of 5,000 households were listening to the programme; six hospitals in New York reported no case brought in because of the broadcast.
3. Which stereotype filled the gap? Our interpretation: the stereotype of “the crowd that hears the radio and panics”. A news report that does not place the reader in that pattern may look less like “news”.

Then ask yourself: In which case is the same pattern at work today? (Try it with a documented case of your own choosing; find two independent sources.)

What does it not prove? The exercise does not say that people were never frightened; as you saw in the magic-bullet lesson, some listeners really were frightened. Showing the gap between pseudo-environment and real environment is not proving the gap’s cause; nor does it prove that the papers invented anything on purpose: in Lippmann’s words, fiction does not mean lies.

Lab

Lab: whose sentence is “manufacture of consent”?

You have three short sources.

1. Lippmann’s 1922 paragraph (chapter XV, fourth section): “the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements”. Creating consent is an old art, but it now rests on analysis; persuasion has become “a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government”. He ends the point with “None of us begins to understand” the consequences.
2. Chomsky’s 1989 talk: he says Lippmann invented the phrase and describes him as considering it “a worthwhile revolution”.
3. Herman and Chomsky (1988): they made the same phrase the title of their book; you will meet the book’s propaganda model in The Propaganda Model: Herman and Chomsky.

The exercise (15 minutes). - a) Read Lippmann’s paragraph slowly (the text of Public Opinion is openly available); next to each sentence write “description” or “recommendation”. - b) Put Chomsky’s summary beside it: does “a worthwhile revolution” appear in the paragraph? Do the remedy elsewhere in the book (organized intelligence, XXV–XXVIII) support this reading or strain it? - c) Write in your own sentence: did Lippmann write the manufacture of consent as a warning or as a prescription?

Our reading (open to debate): the paragraph is mainly descriptive; it says neither “wonderful” nor “disaster”. But Lippmann’s trust in experts is real too (Schudson’s caution). There is no right answer, only the document.

Card

This is how exams ask it

Typical question patterns

• “Who owns the pictures in our heads and the pseudo-environment?” → Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922.
• “Where does ‘manufacture of consent’ occur?” → Lippmann, 1922. As a book title: Herman and Chomsky, 1988 (Turkish: Rızanın İmalatı).
• “Who defined propaganda as managing opinion through significant symbols?” → Lasswell, 1927.
• “Is the public a phantom, or in eclipse?” → Lippmann 1925 / Dewey 1927.

Tempting wrong answers

• Counting Lippmann as the founder of agenda-setting → he is the intellectual ground (Agenda-Setting).
• Mixing the 1927 book with the 1948 article → Propaganda Technique is 1927; the “who, what, in which channel…” formula is 1948 (Lasswell’s formula).
• Giving “engineering of consent” to Lippmann → Bernays, 1947.
• Thinking Lasswell used the “hypodermic needle” phrase in 1927 → The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model.
• The name “propaganda model” occurs in two places: in Turkish sources it is also a name for the hypodermic needle model; Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is something else (The Propaganda Model: Herman and Chomsky).

Years: 1922 Public Opinion; 1925 Phantom Public; 1927 Lasswell and Dewey; 1947 Bernays; 1988 Herman and Chomsky.

Alternative names (in Turkish sources): kamuoyu (public opinion); sözde çevre (pseudo-environment; sahte çevre in one publisher’s blurb); stereotip (kalıp yargı); rızanın imalatı (rıza üretimi). In an exam, write the name exactly as your source uses it.

Summary

Summary card

• Two books, two questions: Lippmann (1922): why do the pictures in our heads not fit the world? Lasswell (1927): how does somebody manage those pictures?
• Lippmann: the pseudo-environment (fiction, not lies), the stereotype (we define first and see afterwards), Public Opinion in capital letters (pictures turned into action), “manufacture of consent” (chapter XV), organized intelligence (the remedy).
• The phantom public (1925): the public is not a fixed body; it takes sides for or against the actors and intervenes occasionally.
• Lasswell: propaganda = managing opinion through significant symbols; not changing objective conditions; one of three instruments (military, economic, propaganda); “passive and contributory”; “propaganda has become a profession” (the propagandist as technician is our shorthand).
• Dewey (1927): the public is not a phantom but in eclipse; the remedy is to improve communication and the conditions of debate; experts find the facts, they do not make the policy.
• The “Lippmann–Dewey debate”: Dewey’s reviews and his 1927 book; Lippmann did not reply; the frame was constructed in the 1980s–90s (Schudson, Jansen).
• Effect: both books describe a conditional effect, strong but not an injection; the “hypodermic” label came later (The Hypodermic Needle and Magic Bullet Model).
• Exam: 1922 / 1925 / 1927 / 1947 / 1988; manufacture (Lippmann) ≠ engineering (Bernays); pseudo-environment ≠ stereotype.