6 ideas
People do not respond directly to the world. They respond to a pseudo-environment, an internal picture assembled from fragments, reports, and imagination. Their behavior is a response to that picture, but its consequences play out in the real environment, which is why well-intentioned action often misfires.
In 1914 a group of English, French, and German residents lived together on a remote island reached by mail steamer only every sixty days. For six weeks after war broke out they went on as friends, acting on a picture of the world that was no longer true. The case shows that people can live loyally inside an obsolete picture of events while the real situation has already turned them into enemies.
Stereotypes are fixed pictures we define before we see: we 'pick out what our culture has already defined for us.' They save the enormous effort of seeing each thing fresh, and they defend our self-image and social position. That same economy makes them resistant to contrary evidence, which gets explained away as the exception.
The function of news is to signalize an event, an obtrusive and recordable fact such as an arrest, a vote, or a price. The function of truth is to bring hidden facts to light and relate them to each other. The press works like a restless searchlight, so it cannot by itself supply citizens with the accurate picture that democratic theory assumes they have.
Democratic theory assumes each voter can form sound opinions on every public question. No citizen has the time, access, or attention to understand an unseen, complex environment, and censorship, privacy, haste, and limited vocabulary distort what does reach them. Self-government built on that assumption rests on a fiction.
Lippmann's remedy is to create independent, specialized organizations that gather and analyze facts and present them to decision-makers and the public. These bodies would be insulated from the interests of those who act on their findings. The public's role then shifts from judging the substance of issues to judging whether proper procedures were followed and backing or opposing those in charge.