In Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News, as he describes the press “snooping at keyholes” I pondered Sartre’s concept of “The Look,” which here places reporters in a position of transcendence, agency, and the rest of us in a position of immanence, passively having meaning projected upon us. However, humans do not tend to thrive in positions of immanence and so Lippmann allows for us to gain some much-needed transcendence by “looking back through the keyhole” and impressing meaning on the reporters themselves.

As Allison brought up, reporters and institutions practice a “destructive form of untruth,” producing sophistry and propaganda to position themselves in a “good light” and as Lippmann notes, abiding by confirmation bias. In response, I agree with Lippmann’s call for language training to be necessitated for reporters. However, in continuing to give readers the agency to “look back at” reporters, I would consider the education that “makes men masters of their vocabulary” a central interest of liberty for all people, and that this type of schooling can “transform the dispute into debate” chiefly when both reporters and non-reporters can take part in it. Lippmann points out that “it is difficult to decide just what reporting is,” so how can readers examine the press without any emphasized language training themselves.

Language education is severely lacking in the modern world, which speaks to the type of shared ignorance Lippmann notes from which we all suffer. This piece largely led me to the conclusion that once language training is emphasized in a way that allows people to understand the power of words and means of liberty within them, free speech will not be plagued by “a mere contest of opinion” but will allow for a more accessible, equitable, and open form of communication in both reporting and public debate.