Liberty and the News

Liberty and the News is Walter Lippmann's short book of nineteen twenty on the condition of the press and what it does to self-government. Its argument is that there is a necessary connection between liberty and truth, so that a people cannot govern itself without a steady supply of news that is truthful, relevant and intelligible. Lippmann holds that the crisis of western democracy in his time is at bottom a crisis in journalism. His charge is that the press exists primarily for its own purposes and agendas and only incidentally to promote the honest interplay of facts and ideas, and he locates the trouble less in advertisers or in governments than in the trade's own confidence that it already knows, and its readiness to assert opinion where it owes the reader fact. He writes in the immediate aftermath of the war, and warns that the machinery built then for managing what the public was told did not disappear with it. Against this he sets out practical reforms, among them documented and transparent sourcing, accountability for falsehood, proper professional training of reporters in evidence and in the use of language, and independent institutes to record and analyse government and public affairs, with the universities supporting the work and an endowed news service free of editorial direction.

Written from the publisher description, Princeton University Press.

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• Walter Lippmann