With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, coining the term "stereotype" in the modern psychological meaning, as well as critiquing media and democracy in his newspaper column and several books, most notably his 1922 Public Opinion.

[2][3] Lippmann also played a notable role as research director of Woodrow Wilson's post-World War I board of inquiry.

His views on the role of journalism in a democracy were contrasted with the contemporaneous writings of John Dewey in what has been retrospectively named the Lippmann–Dewey debate.

Lippmann won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his syndicated newspaper column "Today and Tomorrow" and one for his 1961 interview of Nikita Khrushchev.

His mother, Daisy Baum, cultivated contacts in the highest circles, and the family regularly spent its summer holidays in Europe.

During World War I, Lippmann was commissioned a captain in the Army on June 28, 1918, and was assigned to the intelligence section of the AEF headquarters in France.

He sharply criticized George Creel, whom the President appointed to head wartime propaganda efforts at the Committee on Public Information.

While he was prepared to curb his liberal instincts because of the war, saying he had "no doctrinaire belief in free speech," he nonetheless advised Wilson that censorship should "never be entrusted to anyone who is not himself tolerant, nor to anyone who is unacquainted with the long record of folly which is the history of suppression.

He and Charles Merz, in a 1920 study entitled A Test of the News, stated that The New York Times' coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution was biased and inaccurate.

[citation needed] He argued that people, including journalists, are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than to come to judgment by critical thinking.

Humans condense ideas into symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the mass media, is an ineffective method of educating the public.

[26] After the fall of the British colony Singapore in February 1942, Lippmann authored an influential Washington Post column that criticized empire and called on western nations to "identify their cause with the freedom and security of the peoples of the East" and purge themselves of "white man's imperialism".

"[4] Four years later he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting citing "his 1961 interview with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, as illustrative of Lippmann's long and distinguished contribution to American journalism.

In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann noted that modern realities threatened the stability that the government had achieved during the patronage era of the 19th century.

In his first book on the subject, Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann said that mass man functioned as a "bewildered herd" who must be governed by "a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality."

The elite class of intellectuals and experts were to be a machinery of knowledge to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the "omnicompetent citizen".

Later, in The Phantom Public (1925), Lippmann recognized that the class of experts were also, in most respects, outsiders to any particular problem, and hence not capable of effective action.

Philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed that the public (a composite of many "publics" within society) could form a "Great Community" that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems.

In The Public Philosophy (1955), which took almost twenty years to complete, he presented a sophisticated argument that intellectual elites were undermining the framework of democracy.

Similarities between the views of Lippmann and Gabriel Almond produced what became known as the Almond–Lippmann consensus, which is based on three assumptions:[43] French philosopher Louis Rougier convened a meeting of primarily French and German liberal intellectuals in Paris in August 1938 to discuss the ideas put forward by Lippmann in his work The Good Society (1937).

The friendship and involvement in Foreign Affairs ended when a hotel in Europe accidentally forwarded Lippmann's love letters to Mr.