Featured

Liberty and the news — Reading Companion

(0 User reviews) 656

In Category - Adventure Picaresque Fiction

Authors: Lippmann, Walter, 1889-1974 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2025 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Freedom of the press Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 17,563

Reading time 77 min

Text sections 4

Before opening Liberty and the news — Reading Companion, the edition data offers a quick orientation: 17,563 words, 1 hr 17 min estimated reading time, and 4 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 22.8 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Freedom of the press,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #77035

Walter Lippmann examines the crisis of journalism in 1920s democracy, arguing that the real threat to liberty is not censorship of opinion but suppression of news and lack of factual standards.

Editorial Edition Score 4.5/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg77035

Read the Text

LIBERTY _and the_ NEWS

NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 1920

In writing this tract I have dared to believe that many things were possible because of the personal example offered to all who practice journalism by Mr. C. P. Scott, for over forty-five years editor-in-chief of the _Manchester Guardian_. In the light of his career it cannot seem absurd or remote to think of freedom and truth in relation to the news.

Two of the essays in this volume, “What Modern Liberty Means” and “Liberty and the News” were published originally in the _Atlantic Monthly_. I wish to thank Mr. Ellery Sedgwick for the encouragement he gave me while writing them, and for permission to reprint them in this volume.

New York City. January 1, 1920.

PAGE Journalism and the Higher Law 3

What Modern Liberty Means 19

Liberty and the News 69

JOURNALISM AND THE HIGHER LAW

Volume 1, Number 1, of the first American newspaper was published in Boston on September 25, 1690. It was called _Publick Occurrences_. The second issue did not appear because the Governor and Council suppressed it. They found that Benjamin Harris, the editor, had printed “reflections of a very high nature.”[1] Even to-day some of his reflections seem very high indeed. In his prospectus he had written:

“That something may be done toward the Curing, or at least the Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us, wherefore nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason to believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our Information. And when there appears any material mistake in anything that is collected, it shall be corrected in the next. Moreover, the Publisher of these Occurrences is willing to engage, that whereas, there are many False Reports, maliciously made, and spread among us, if any well-minded person will be at the pains to trace any such false Report, so far as to find out and Convict the First Raiser of it, he will in this Paper (unless just Advice be given to the contrary) expose the Name of such Person, as A malicious Raiser of a false Report. It is suppos’d that none will dislike this Proposal, but such as intend to be guilty of so villainous a Crime.”

Everywhere to-day men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.

I do not agree with those who think that the sole cause is corruption. There is plenty of corruption, to be sure, moneyed control, caste pressure, financial and social bribery, ribbons, dinner parties, clubs, petty politics. The speculators in Russian rubles who lied on the Paris Bourse about the capture of Petrograd are not the only example of their species. And yet corruption does not explain the condition of modern journalism.

Mr. Franklin P. Adams wrote recently: “Now there is much pettiness--and almost incredible stupidity and ignorance--in the so-called free press; but it is the pettiness, etc., common to the so-called human race--a pettiness found in musicians, steamfitters, landlords, poets, and waiters. And when Miss Lowell [who had made the usual aristocratic complaint] speaks of the incurable desire in all American newspapers to make fun of everything in season and out, we quarrel again. There is an incurable desire in American newspapers to take things much more seriously than they deserve. Does Miss Lowell read the ponderous news from Washington? Does she read the society news? Does she, we wonder, read the newspapers?”

Continue Reading →

Walter Lippmann opens Liberty and the News by recalling the fate of Publick Occurrences, the first American newspaper, suppressed in 1690 for printing “reflections of a very high nature.” He quotes its editor Benjamin Harris promising to expose “malicious Raiser[s] of a false Report” and to correct mistakes. This historical episode frames Lippmann’s central argument: the present crisis of western democracy is “a crisis in journalism.” He does not blame corruption alone but points to a deeper structural problem—the unregulated manufacture of consent. The book, a collection of essays originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, is dedicated to C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian as a personal example of journalistic integrity.

From Liberty of Opinion to Protection of News

Lippmann argues that the older doctrine of liberty, which demanded toleration of opinions, is inadequate for a world where opinion is “sensitive and decisive.” He shifts the axis of controversy: instead of drawing fine distinctions between liberty and license, the crucial task is to make opinion “increasingly responsible to the facts.” He writes, “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.” The suppression of opinion may be bad, but “the really deadly thing is to suppress the news.” This distinction is the book’s core. Lippmann observes that people are more aroused when their “curiosity is baulked” than when abstract freedom of opinion is threatened. The desire to know and the dislike of being deceived are powerful motives that can be enlisted for freedom.

The Manufacture of Consent and the Shift in Sovereignty

Lippmann describes a political landscape where “government by consent” is imperiled by the unregulated manufacture of consent. He identifies “extra-legal organs of government”—special interest groups such as labor nuclei, farmers’ nuclei, prohibition nuclei, and the National Security League—that conduct “a continual electioneering campaign upon the unformed, exploitable mass of public opinion.” These groups have special sources of information, and what they lack “is often manufactured.” The government acts in reference to these groups more than to district congressmen. Politics consists in “coercing and seducing the representative by the threat and the appeal of these unofficial groups.” This shift in the “locus of sovereignty” places a premium on manufacturing consent. Lippmann notes that the most powerful newspaper proprietor in the English-speaking world declined a mere government post, underscoring the real power of controlled opinion.

The Peace Conference and the Demand for Open Covenants

Lippmann offers a concrete example: the most general criticism of the Peace Conference was that “the covenants were not openly arrived at.” This fact stirred Republican Senators, British Labor, and parties from Right to Left. The demand for open covenants was not an abstract plea for liberty of opinion but a specific protest against the suppression of news. Lippmann uses this to illustrate that the public’s desire to know—their “dislike of being deceived and made game of”—is a stronger motive for defending freedom than abstract principles. He argues that building the case for liberty on the dogma of unlimited prerogatives of opinion is to build it on “the poorest foundation,” because freedom of opinion is often seen as “freedom of error, illusion, and misinterpretation.” The real foundation is the protection of the sources of news.

Lippmann’s tract is a call to shift the debate from negative liberty (toleration) to positive standards of evidence and fact. He does not offer a complete program but insists that “the protection of the sources of its opinion is the basic problem of democracy.” Readers should attend to his recurring contrast between opinion and news, and his insistence that the desire to know is more potent than the desire to be free from censorship. The book is best read as a diagnosis of a structural crisis, not a prescription for reform.

That rainy afternoon, Liberty and the News kept circling a quiet dread: how easily a fact can be lost when no one agrees what one is. I set it down, restless, and found myself reaching for an old memoir instead. There, someone had simply written down their days, unpolished, and the honesty felt like a small, stubborn anchor—Autobiographic Sketches — Edition Insights—proof that a single true telling still matters.