The Journalist and the Manipulator: Walter Lippmann, Karl Mannheim, and the Case for a “New Objectivity” to Check Demagoguery

Abstract

Prior to Donald Trump’s presidency, many scholars viewed the 1930s through the 1960s as the period when demagogues such as Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace posed the greatest threat to the American republic. Concerns about the public’s vulnerability to the emotional manipulation practiced by demagogues were, however, present from the founding forward, becoming particularly acute at the dawn of the modern age. This article argues that two important early twentieth century works, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, maintained that the demagogue’s most effective tool was the creation of an absolutist, often personalistic, mythology. Mannheim contended that journalists could combat the corrosive influence on the public of demagogues’ absolutist rhetoric by practicing a “new objectivity,” an approach to interpreting and explaining phenomena that encouraged “the broadest possible extension of [the public’s] horizon of vision.”