Public Opinion & the Role of the Government
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The purpose of this research is to examine the role of the government in the development of public opinion, chiefly as presented by Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion. The plan of the research will be to set forth Lippmann's view of the ways in which the government may set limits upon the free circulation of ideas in and among the community of the government, as well as the uses by the government to present positive and negative images to the community which will have the effect of affecting the form and content that public opinion may take. In this regard, the problems that may from time to time be created by the character of the government's role in shaping public opinion will be discussed with reference to several areas, including direct government censorship, the claims of privacy in an open society vis a vis the government and the public interest, and the position of the media in balancing the claims of various information based constituencies. Lippmann's views will be compared with those of two other commentators (Bagdikian and Parenti), with a view toward suggesting how the perceptions of the problems associated with the development of public opinion may have shifted from the earlier to the latter part of the twentieth century.In order to understand why Lippmann considers the issue of public opinion to be an important one in the American society, it is useful to have some idea of the motives behind the creation of his book. He appears to place the issue of public opi
. . .
rception of it. In this regard, Lippmann observes that corporations make a claim to privacy that is greater than that of the government, but adds that "there was a time when the affairs of all corporations were held to be as private as a man's theology is to day" (4:29). In any event, corporations do play a role in molding public opinion today, particularly, as Bagdikian points out, for the reason that they have such immediate access to the media, which are the main vehicles by which the public receives information. Indeed, Bagdikian implies that in the modern world corporations are the media, and a very few of them at that.
[T]en corporations have well over half the audience for
AM and FM commercial radio. . . . Communications laws in
effect in 1982 limit ownership of radio stations to seven
per corporation, but by purchasing stations in the
largest markets these corporations can obtain access to
far more than the average audience for the 8,000
commercial stations (1:15).
Bagdikian makes the point that in their way, corporations exercise almost as large an influence on public opinion as the government. Not only that, the "largeness" of corporations in this regard is not entirely apparent. As he states, "On the surface
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 3276
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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