ABSTRACT
Liberty and the News is a key transitional work in the corpus of Walter Lippmann's writings. With the attractions of radio and television the current population of college students, for example, is scarcely literate in newspaper reading, while once they would have been expected to peruse more than one newspaper a day. From today's point of view Lippmann's argument seems unusually prescient. The concrete illustrations Lippmann offered indicate that in 1919 he was alarmed not just by the frustration of the war aims for which America had entered World War I, but by the nature of the peace treaty that followed it. Lippmann had already written off most of professional political science as too formalistic and detached from social events as he knew them, and also unduly wary of the best modem psychology. In the face of whatever democratic lethargies he detected, Lippmann was determined to try to rescue the ideals of self-government.
