Public Opinion

Walter Lippmann opens with Plato's allegory of the cave and a story about islanders who, in 1914, went on living for weeks as friends of their German and French neighbours because the news of the war had not yet reached them. We all act, he argues, not on the world itself but on 'the pictures in our heads', simplified images shaped by habit, censorship, limited time and what he calls stereotypes. He examines how news is made and why it differs from truth, how leaders shape what the public believes, and whether ordinary citizens can know enough to govern a complex modern society.

Lippmann (1889–1974), one of the most influential American journalists of the century, published the book in 1922; it gave the word 'stereotype' its modern meaning and popularised the phrase 'the manufacture of consent'. It is a founding work in the study of media. The allegory he begins with is in Plato's Republic.