Journalism and Democracy: Lessons from Walter Lippmann

A hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann, one of the great analysts of democratic life, wrote that the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism. Press barons, Lippmann feared, were so powerful that government based on the consent of the governed was under threat if unregulated media owners could manufacture consent. If the facts were not being made available to the public, how could the public make proper democratic choices? Today, those words ring as true as they ever did. In place of press barons like William Randolph Hearst are corporations that curry favour with an administration that has no compunction about making regulatory decisions based on who the President thinks are his friends. TV networks remove comedians who offend the President for fear of retribution. Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper that for a while adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness”, prevented the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris and subsequently announced that the opinions page would henceforth only carry pieces that supported free markets and personal liberties. And in an age when most people get their news in two-second bites from social media, how can the governed give meaningful consent?

These are of course age-old questions about democracy: what does government of the people, by the people look like? How do we have a functioning democracy if we agree on a common set of facts – and how can journalists do their work if people don’t believe they’re pursuing the truth?

Each generation wrestles with these kinds of questions in new ways, not least in the face of new media technology—whether the spread of the millionaire-owned popular press in the early twentieth century, the rise of radio or cable TV or the internet.

In this episode, we draw on Walter Lippmann’s 20th-century warnings about the vulnerability of democracy to propaganda, misinformation, and public disengagement, to assess the challenges facing journalism in 2025.

Adam Smith speaks to Marty Baron, former Washington Post executive editor between 2013 and 2021 and to Dr Tom Arnold Forster, author of Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, published by Princeton University Press.

The Last Best Hope? is a podcast of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. For details of our programming go to rai.ox.ac.uk

Producer: Emily Williams. Presenter: Adam Smith

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