The Shimmer in the Twilight: Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion and the Journalist’s Way of Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the final section of Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann urges journalists to enlist help from scientists and social scientists to provide the public with “a picture of reality on which [they] can act.” Lippmann, however, acknowledges that there are matters of public concern that are not susceptible to the measuring, quantifying, and recording integral to scientific and social scientific inquiry, matters that oblige journalists “to occupy the position of an umpire in the unscored baseball game.” Lippmann did not tell journalists how to illuminate this “twilight zone” of news. This article argues that the political scientist James Scott’s discussion in his classic work Seeing Like a State of the value of “metis” for understanding one’s environment complements Lippmann’s work by highlighting practical knowledge’s value for navigating a world in which science’s “explanatory virtues” can obscure phenomena that cannot be measured but, nonetheless, journalists must describe and interpret in a republic.