d messages" (4:19) that the individual may receive that go to influencing his or her opinions. To put it another way, those who transmit the messages to the public, whether government or media, must inevitably seek to affect the effect that the messages will have upon the collective public. On the individual level, the result is that, as Lippmann says, a person "gradually . . . makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside of his head of the world beyond his reach" (4:18). On the mass level, the result of the messages that are sent to the public is that "opinions are crystallized into what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed" (4:19).
The government's role in all of this comes into play, even in a representative democracy such as the U.S.A. It comes into play in particular when the government is involved in a war or in some other kind of public policy action. To sum up the role of government, all that needs to be said is that the government routinely engages in policies that include censorship of the facts of a case. Without this censorship, says Lippmann, the government could neither hold on to the trust of the American people on one hand, or pursue the reality of its policies on the other. In other words, the government uses censorship to maintain a gap between the real content of actual events and the perception of those events (and hence of the government!) by the public.
To make his point, Lippmann cites the gap between what the French people heard from their government about French military positions against Germany in World War I and the facts of various battles, noting that "what had actually happened [in the battle] differed from both the French and German accounts" (4:25). But there are more contemporary examples to be had as well, such as the famous denial of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 that there was no U 2 spy plane and that anywa...