“The breakdown of the means of public knowledge” is a phrase coined by the great American journalist, Walter Lippmann. He used it in Liberty and the News (1920), which is about to be reissued. His argument is simple. Robert Park summarised it thus:

that political liberty, under modern conditions, is no longer guaranteed by the mere freedom of speech, i.e., the freedom to express opinion and criticize the government, but by the completeness, the accuracy, the fidelity with which the newspapers report the news.

Lippmann, as ever, put it even more pithily: “the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism.”

Now liberal journalist Sidney Blumenthal has written an afterword, that uses Lippmann to attack the conservative media.

Blumenthal picks up on the old notion that people use the media to reinforce their prejudices rather than challenge them (only conservatives, mind you), but then he stops:

Today, about one-third of the public actively chooses sources of information that play to their prejudices. The readers, listeners, and viewers of the Drudge Report, the Rush Limbaugh show, and Fox News have consciously selected “the quack, the charlatan, the jingo” to seal themselves from objective information.

The “breakdown of the means of public knowledge,” as Lippmann called it, rests on a carefully cultivated preference for crank opinion over unsettling fact. The more reality defies this public’s understanding, the more fervently it redoubles its resistance to it, embracing the distorted stereotype as the only true account.

To go beyond Lippmann, you have to acknowledge that there is no meta-level of knowledge that will allow for the ideal of the ultimately well-informed public which democratic idealists (journalists amongst them) still cherish.

Blumenthal is wrong to horsewhip the conservative media. He wants a world where everyone can go along with Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

In actual fact, there are few genuine incentives for individuals to gather facts about public affairs, and none that reward avid viewing of Fox News over – say – failure to watch any news programming.

How do we reward information-seeking on public affairs issues? Will information- seekers turn out to be most persistently those who have already made up their minds? Should we then reward anti-abortion campaigners for their mastery of one side of a contested issue? Not easy, is it?

Time contraints, complexity, and the division of labour all tend toward specialization in knowledge (good) and fragmentation of common interest (bad).

We live in a world of incomplete information, where decision-making includes feedback mechanisms (e.g. occasional voting, the media, the law) that ease the implementation of policies for special interest groups the membership of which sometimes includes us.

In such a world, we can only hope not that the public become philosophers, but that incentives exist to bring as much relevant information to bear on decision-making as is possible. And that those decisions are tempered by some respect for our own individual interests.

Journalism, never designed for the task, once shouldered the first part of that burden. But increasingly, every branch of human activity has to acknowledge it, if only to realize that existing institutions and arrangements may not be up to the task of tackling the problems we collectively face.