the newspapers had appointed themselves "defenders of the faith." The result, according to Lippmann, was a "breakdown of the means of public knowledge." The difficulty went beyond war or revolution, the "supreme destroyers of realistic thinking." The traffic in sex, violence, and "human interest"—staples of modern mass journalism—raised grave questions about the future of democracy. "All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news."

In Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), Lippmann broadened his indictment to include not only the press but the public itself. He no longer argued simply that the press ought to keep the public better informed. Instead he proposed to confine the role of public opinion in policy-making to strictly procedural questions, reserving substantive decisions to an administrative elite. "The public interest in a problem," Lippmann argued, "is limited to this: that there shall be rules.... The public is interested in law, not in the laws; in the method of law, not in the substance." Questions of substance should be left to experts, whose access to scientific knowledge immunized them against the emotional "symbols" and "stereotypes" that dominated public debate.

Lippmann acknowledged the conflict between his recommendations and the principles that usually guided "democratic reformers." Those principles were simply "false," in his view. He rejected the "mystical fallacy of democracy" and the "usual appeal to education as the remedy for the incompetence of democracy." Democratic theory presupposed an "omnicompetent citizen," a "jack of all trades" who could be found only in a "simple self-contained community." In the "wide and unpredictable environment" of the modern world, the old ideal of citizenship was obsolete. Nor could it be revived in the workshop, as guild socialists proposed. Democratic control of the workshop would not eliminate the difficulty that the relations between one shop and another raised issues that "transcend immediate experience." Unless guild socialism was to degenerate into a "chaos of warring shops," the management of their "external relations" would still have to be delegated to elected officials, and the whole problem of representation would arise all over again. "The public opinions of a shop about its rights and duties in the industry and in society, are matters of education and propaganda, not the automatic product of shopconsciousness." The guild socialists could not escape the "problem of the

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