DEMOCRACY = "The Manufacture Of Consent"

To James Thurber, in a 1943 New Yorker cartoon, Walter Lippmann was the object of respectful humor:  Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations,

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/34278/harry-c-mcpherson-jr/walter-lippmann-and-the-american-century#

          a wife looks up from a newspaper and tells her husband, Lippmann scares me this morning.

• To Judge Learned Hand, Colonel House, and five hundred guests at a testimonial dinner in 1931,
• he was, in the words of Time magazine,
• "their Moses, their prophet of Liberalism."
• To Dean Acheson, writing his memoirs, he was "that ambivalent Jeremiah."
• To Woodrow Wilson, for whom Lippmann prepared several of the famous Fourteen Points, his judgment was "most unsound";
• to Lyndon Johnson, it was ultimately far worse than that.

Lippmann was America's, and perhaps the world's, most influential journalist.

• Walter Lippmann – who shaped progressive “journalism,” said,

• In the absence of institutions and education 
• by which the environment is so successfully reported
• that the realities of public life stand out very sharply
• against self-centered opinion
• the common interests very largely elude
• public opinion entirely, and
• can be managed only by a specialized class

• democracy is “the manufacture of consent” 
• citizens “are mentally children.”

Edward Bernays said:

• The conscious and intelligent manipulation
• of the organized habits and opinions of the masses 
• is an important element in democratic society
• Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism
• of society constitute an invisible government
• which is the true ruling power of our country