Public Opinion (1922) is perhaps Lippmann’s most well-known work. It was in this piece that Lippmann first began to develop and explain his theories on the formation of public opinion. Lippmann (1922) begins this book by describing a situation in 1914, where a number of Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen were trapped on an island. They have no access to media of any kind, except for once every sixty days when the mail comes, alerting them to situations in the real world. Lippmann explains that these people lived in peace on the island, treating each other as friends, when in actuality the war had broken out and they were enemies (Lippmann, 1922).
The purpose of the above anecdote is to develop the idea of The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads
(Lippmann, 1922, p. 3). Throughout Public
Opinion, Lippmann (1922) explains the way that our individual opinions can differ from those that are expressed in the outside world. He develops the idea of propaganda, claiming that
In order to conduct propaganda, there must be some barrier between the public and the event
(Lippmann, 1922, p. 28). With this separation, there is the ability of the media to
manipulate events or present limited information to the public. This information may not match the public’s perception of the event. In this way, Lippmann was essentially presenting some of the
first views on the mass communication concepts of gatekeeping and agenda-setting, by showing the media’s power to limit public access to information.
Lippmann (1922) showed how individuals use tools such as stereotypes to form their opinions. In putting together our public opinions, not only do we have to picture more space than
we can see with our eyes, and more time than we can feel, but we have to describe and judge more people, more actions, more things than we can ever count, or vividly imagine…We have to pick our
samples, and treat them as typical
(Lippmann, 1922, p. 95). Lippmann shows that the public is left with these stereotypical judgments until the media presents limited information to change
their perception of an event. Rogers (1994) claims that in this way, Lippmann was showing us that ...the pseudo-environment that is conveyed to us by the media is the result of a
high degree of gatekeeping in the news process
(p. 237). Lippmann recognized that the media was altering the flow of information, by limiting the media content that was presented to the
public. Furthermore, Lippmann presents the idea of agenda-setting, as he recognizes that the mass media is the link between individual perceptions of a world, and the world that actually exists
(Rogers, 1994).
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