1914: Men and women are going about their lives – operating businesses, buying goods to import, planning production to export, the working-classes toil labouriously in factories.
Thousands are planning trips across the continent.
These men and women have a picture in their head of Europe. That picture is a mix off their own experiences and that which they’ve read and heard. It’s a picture that guides their plans
The picture is already outdated.
23rd February 1916
It’s the worst moment of the Battle of Verdun, a 10 month battle that will decide the war. 150,000 will die.
A german offensive is pushing the French army back.
General Joffre is in Paris at an editorial conference.
The men in the room are arguing over words – the position and tenor of nouns, adjectives and verbs to be sent by telegraph to press offices.
Prime Minister Clemenceau’s office calls. They ask the men to emphasise the scale of the German advance. He wants to prepare the public for the worst.
They’re all writing out proposals, making amendments.
One officer feels General Pelle’s proposed wording was too alarming, but the officer’s own version now felt too moderate.
HE felt, though, that the tone had to stick to the formula the public expected or risk harming morale.
General de Castelnau suggests adding ‘as had been anticipated’ to ease the publics alarm.
They agree and the words are sent out to press offices all over the world.
A few days later the Germans announce they’ve taken Fort Douaumont after a bitter struggle.
Their press release is the first the French have heard of it.
Reports from the front had said nothing.
The press release is being read around the world.
The French have to respond.
With communications cut and time of essence they fabricate the following story, hoping it’s close enough to the truth:
‘A bitter struggle is taking place around Fort de Douaumont which is an advanced post of the old defensive organization of Verdun. The position taken this morning by the enemy, after several unsuccessful assaults that cost him very heavy losses, has been reached again and passed by our troops whom the enemy has not been able to drive back.’
The press release goes out to the world.
1922
6 years later, in 1922, the most famous American journalist of the day, Walter Lippmann, describes these scenes in his book Public Opinion.
He writes that we have now learned to call this propaganda, a term that was neutral at the time.
But WW1 changed everything about how we view the world. It raised so many questions not just about the power of information, but how that information could mobilise so many to kill. How could Europe deteriorate into a horrific war that no-one expected, but no-one could avert. How could millions of people be swept up in it.
It saw the birth of public relations, political advertising, propaganda, and press offices.
And It changed the way elites came to think about who the public were, and how their view of the world developed.
Lippmann knew the world of journalism inside out. He had won two Pulitzer prizes and during the war worked with President Wilson to setup the Committee on public information – a government department to win the hearts and minds of americans sceptical of joining the war.
As the war came to end, Lippmann set out to analyse what had happened, to think deeply about how information travelled and formed into opinion. He wanted to understand how people came to see a world out of sight.
What he found out lead him to write what is probably the most damning critique of democracy ever written.
It was later found out that neither the German or the French accounts of the taking of Fort Douamount were true. Both countries had made up the report.
The truth was that Some German soldiers had snuck into the small Fort which had largely been abandoned with only a few men inside. There were no shots, no battle, no losses.
Why was reporting a battle with losses on both sides better than reporting either nothing, or the truth?
Lippmann’s answer? Because its what people expected.
The expected environment, the one that fits the pictures already implanted in peoples heads, is always more convincing than a surprising truth.
Officials described the made up battle as part of the ‘war of attrition’ that everyone was beginning to expect, even themselves.
This term – ‘war of attrituion’ had become a stereotype – a simplification of a complicated scene in a country far away.
INTERLUDE
There is a physical place. Landscape, people, objects, intentions, words spoken. Bullets, commands, food, emotions.
Then there are people who are interested in that place – generals, politicians, journalists, citizens.
The try to discover an construct a accurate representation of it, either by conversation, by print, by photo, or video.
The representations these people build are necessarily partial; a place is too complex to be represented in its entirety. Even for a person there.
These representations are a mixture of truth, of mistake, of perspective, of ideas, of fictions.
This representation of the world is what Walter Lippmann called the pseudo-environment.
The pseudo-environment is unimaginably complex – it’s the synthesis of the world reported by journalists, government agencies, thinktanks, bureaucracies, universities, statistics, propaganda.
It’s the mass of pictures constructed of the world.
It’s the beginning of how public opinion is formed.
In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, He writes that ‘The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined’
This pseudo-environment morphs depending upon on what constitutes things like ‘pubic interest’, what’s considered public and private, between the closed doors of the state and the public eye, the information officials want to be seen and the information they dont.
Lippmann writes, ‘The analyst of public opinion must begin then, by recognizing the triangular relationship between the scene of action, the human picture of that scene, and the human response to that picture working itself out upon the scene of action.’
The way this pseudo-environment is formed depends upon which information is relaseased, how its released and why.
Certain groups have accepted ways of doing this, norms, rules, ideas
The army, trade unions, politicians, pressure groups, corporations, all have different wyas of thinking about and directing their information.
‘Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony.’
But how is it possible that anyone makes sense of this seemingly chaotic unordered world.
STEREOTYPES.
Information coalesces into anchor points. Complex knowledge into simple stereotypes to be conveyed to others.
Lippmann writes ‘He is an intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a “South European.” He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard Man.’
Working-class, Left, Right, Government, journalist, ww1, Verdun, – they all summon a simple picture in our minds.
Lippmann realised that stereotypes always have an internal logic – that certain people always get to define, speak for and/or about the stereotype.
He writes ‘The priest, the lord of the manor, the captains and the kings, the party leaders, the merchant, the boss, however these men are chosen, whether by birth, inheritance, conquest or election, they and their organized following administer human affairs.’
All of these formed into hierarchies that direct the flow of information. Apprentices learn from masters. Sons from fathers. Trade unions control their policies, political parties select candidates.
Wherever you look, information flows in hierarchies of some kind
‘if you take any particular institution, be it a legislature, a party, a trade union, a nationalist movement, a factory, or a club, the number of those who govern is a very small percentage of those who are theoretically supposed to govern.’
It’s this point of his analysis that led Lippmanmn to a stark realisation. That democracy was a myth. That the average man contributing to the public sphere was almost impossible to see. That hierarchy and the interplay between competing instituions still directed affairs.
How could millions of individual men spontaneously manufacture ‘pubic opinion’?
‘nowhere’ he wrote, ‘does the machine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized. Certainly not in trades unions, nor in socialist parties, nor in communist governments. There is an inner circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file’
There are only a few limited ways in which the public as a mass can act – usually in the form of a protest, strike, an ‘applaud or a hiss’. Government by the people, at least in modern nation states, was impossible.
‘The citizen goes to the polls, receives a ballot on which a number of measures are printed, almost always in abbreviated form, and, if he says anything at all, he says Yes or No. The most brilliant amendment in the world may occur to him. He votes Yes or No on that bill and no other.’
So public opinion doesn’t materialise in the minds of the public, it comes from leaders, leaders who have access to certain kinds of information, papers, networks of colleagues, corridors of power – who let others know the information they wish them to know and deny them access to the information they don’t. Who try to make sense of almost impossibly complex situations.
In this way the heirarchies of institutions and organisations manufacture consent .
If public opinion is not, in fact, public opinion, if the pseudo-environment is a mirage of truth, and if simple stereotypes guide our thought, how does Lippman propose overcoming such a unsatisfactory state of affairs?
His answer has been both influential and controversial till this day.
He wrote that ‘representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.’
Because public opinion comes from institutions rather than the public, Lippmann argues that better institutions should be our focus.
‘The better the institutions, the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced, the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news.’
The answer lies not in the press, because the press didn’t have access behind the scenes, and because they were commercially bias, but in ‘organized intelligence’ – intelligence bureaus – independent from government departments, journalists – supposedly rigorous and impartial
‘In forty-eight states, and 2400 cities, and 277,000 school houses, 270,000 manufacturing establishments, 27,000 mines and quarries, there is a wealth of experience, if only it were recorded and available.’
What he wanted was more bureaucracy, more intellectuals, more ‘objective’ social scientists.
This emphasis on the poverty of the public, on hierarchy and intelligence bureau’s earned him the reputation of an elitist. A technocrat.
And his analysis on the failings of democracy is an unflinchingly pessimistic one.
But he crystalised what many were thinking after WW1, and was a forerunner to the fathers of public relations and advertising that sprung up in the interwar years.
Many have defended Lippman –
And in many ways we have seen exactly what he argued for – a proliferation of data, of think tanks, of civil servants.
To our eyes he may seem too optimistic about the power of more information. Underestimated the extent to which public figures could still pick and choose the information presented.
World War One changed the way we think about the public, about a nations social life, about ideology, propaganda, and information.
It was an odd war because in many ways it wasn’t started by this – it was started by old-fashioned realites like capital expansion, imperialism, aristocratic power, and treaties.
But these things didn’t finish it – words, print, ideas did.
Most belligerents set up press offices and began experimenting with propaganda and carefully directed exaggerations.
For years, many historians argued that it was British propaganda about German attocities that was desicive in bringing American into the war.
German General Ludendorf wrote that ‘Responsibility for the war, Belgian atrocities, the ill-treatment of prisoners,… our mendacity and brutality, … the enslavement of the German people, all these reproaches were cleverly invented, for the purposes of the campaign of lies against us and had the greatest effect all over the world.’
It wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that historians started to prove that stories of German atrocities were truth, even if some were made up and exaggerated.
As always, the war of the words is continuing long after the war of worlds has finished.