Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion Revisited

We have chosen Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion for an extended book review – the only one to be published in this special issue on the impact of the coronavirus on religious social life – for two main reasons: it is considered a classic in communication studies, and, in our view, it provides us with a lens that gives us a longer perspective through which to view the confused and confusing situation in the public sphere resulting from the catastrophe that the Covid-19 pandemic has caused. The time is opportune to revisit this landmark book. It is not the first time that the book has lately been revisited in other communications journals. Petersen (2003, 258) wrote in Journalism defending Lippmann’s support for democracy, in spite of his strong criticism of the myth of a democracy ruled by the sovereignty of the informed citizen and his proposal of delegating to experts the task and challenge of collecting the relevant information about social life and giving it to the statesmen who really decide. Petersen rightly ends his review of Lippmann’s book with a keen question: