https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/06/big-media-
Big Brother, in the person of President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was not persuaded by the findings of the Mueller investigation: “If there wasn’t active collusion proven, then I think what we have here is a case of passive collusion”. To put it another way, if President Trump is not guilty of being a Kremlin agent, in any technical, literal or actual sense, then he is still guilty. Former Director Clapper—along with former CIA Director Brennan and former FBI Director Comey—helped generate the Great Kremlin Conspiracy in the first place. Is there, then, a possibility that James Clapper might have a particular agenda in his strange response to the Mueller Report? Are we, perhaps, on the verge of uncovering one of the great scandals in American history, in which the intelligence agencies of the United States conspired to affect the course and consequences of a presidential election? Do not expect a media outfit such as CNN to take up the story—after all, James Clapper gave his reaction to the Mueller Report in his present capacity as CNN’s “National Security Analyst”. Big Media, regrettably, is no less invested in the Great Kremlin Conspiracy (2015–19) than Big Brother.
Today, news and truth are like passing strangers. It was not supposed to be like this. The Walter Lippmann–John Dewey debate of the mid-twentieth century revolved around the question of whether the ordinary person could ever be expected to interpret meaningfully what was happening in the wider world. Dewey, in an optimistic liberal vein, believed it possible to educate Joe and Jane Citizen with the necessary wherewithal to be informed and insightful enough to make sense of the world for themselves. In contrast, Lippmann believed we were reliant on journalists and editors choosing objectivity over ideology and putting even-handedness before their own interests. That remains, however unlikely, freedom’s best hope.
Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) was a sceptical—though not cynical—analysis of the problems of ordinary people exercising genuine democratic oversight of their governing class. The supposed purpose of the press and news media, as the Fourth Estate, was to make our political elite genuinely responsive to public opinion. This process, asserted Lippmann, was handicapped by the disjointedness and changeability of the untutored opinions of the public. There were, therefore, two interconnected problems that needed addressing for the health of a modern democracy. First, whatever the assertions of news agencies, facts invariably require interpretation (meaning anything from contextualisation to prioritisation or omission). Second, the modern world has become “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting” for the private citizen, bound by the limits of “subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental images”, to pursue meaningful interpretation without expert assistance. The role of the press and the news media, thus, was the “manufacture of public opinion”, an expression that in 1922 did not attract the opprobrium attached to it since the publication of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s treatise on the mainstream media.
