The air has cooled off in Alabamaland and it appears the 2007 global warming heat wave has finally waned. And according to the birding experts, migrants are on the move South. So I may have to get back on the chase after breakfast.

Even The Bunker is finally cooling off enough to break out one of my half-Cherokee grandmother's quilts for the big brass bed. She has been in her grave now for 30 years, but her fine quilts are still an inspiration to me, along with the copies of Mark Twain's books she gave me from her library in St. Clair County before her passing.

You may recall that I recently quoted from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Today I want to talk a little bit about another author, a famous columnist named Walter Lippmann, especially to debunk a label that has been pinned on me of late by a local used car salesman. As you will see from this essay, I am no "elitist."

I hope the bad students down at the Big Mule Press are listening, but I do not have much hope since they are passing off another piece of manufactured GOP propaganda as news even today, with no documentary evidence and a key source who, of course, could not be reached for comment. You know who I am talking about. I refuse to link to their bullshit.

But to prove that I am a truly independent scholar ruled by no political party or ideology, I am also going to publicly quibble with a couple of liberal writers who I otherwise respect. That is still allowed under the First Amendment, I presume.

Scott Horton at Harpers.org has written a blurb about the re-release of Lippmann's book Liberty and the News and linked to a column by Sidney Blumenthal about it. Both of these men are incredibly educated and brilliant, and Lippmann's book is worth reading to be sure.

The problem is, the book was written in 1920 and Lippmann changed his mind about some things about the public by 1925 that guided him through the next half a century as one of the most widely circulated columnists in American newspaper history. I know this because I spent a considerable amount of time reading up on this debate in the 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Alabama and Tennessee.

One of my professors at Alabama had been trying for years to finish and publish a book about some of this. I'm not sure if he ever did, but I still have the early manuscript and do recall having a problem even with his analysis.

This part is true, although it would be difficult to find anyone who would admit it.

"Everywhere today, men are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand," Lippmann wrote. "Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise."

Does this not remind you of the ongoing debate about the Alabama monopoly press coverage of the case of Don Siegelman?

"Lippmann had witnessed firsthand how the 'manufacture of consent' had deranged democracy," Blumenthal writes. "But he did not hold those in government solely responsible. He also described how the press corps was carried away on the wave of patriotism and became self-censors, enforcers, and sheer propagandists. Their careerism, cynicism, and error made them destroyers of 'liberty of opinion' and agents of intolerance, who subverted the American constitutional system of self-government."

Even the great newspaper owners, Lippman wrote, "believe that edification is more important than veracity. They believe it profoundly, violently, relentlessly. They preen themselves upon it. To patriotism, as they define it from day to day, all other considerations must yield."

That seems to be as true today as it was in 1920, to be sure, and it is certainly the primariy reason for the ratings success of Fox News. It was Lippmann who first identified the tendency of journalists to generalize about other people based on fixed ideas, what he called "stereotypes," coining the phrase often used today. Lippmann argued that people - including journalists - are more apt to believe "the pictures in their heads" than come to judgment by critical thinking.

Humans condense ideas in to symbols, he wrote, and journalism, a force quickly becoming the "mass media" in his day, could be an effective method of educating the public if they took their charge seriously, Lippmann argued in another book, his 1922 classic Public Opinion.

In that work, a more definitive book than Liberty and the News, Lippman argued that twentieth century advances in the technology of "the manufacture of consent" amounts to "a revolution" in "the practice of democracy" because this allows the control over public opinion about the world and about the public's interests in that world. Control of public opinion, he said, was a means of controlling public behavior.

All of this came out of the early days of mass propaganda, when many scholars in America worried about the manipulation of the public already going on from Germany during the first World War.

Lippmann was optimistic about American democracy and the Jeffersonian ideal early on, along with the role of the press in educating the public to be informed citizens.

But later on he gave up on the press and the public, writing in his 1925 book The Phantom Public that a governing class of elites "must rise to face the new challenges." He came to see the public as Plato did, a great beast or a bewildered herd – floundering in the "chaos of local opinions."

Leftist scholar Noam Chomsky in his day came to be seen as Lippmann's intellectual antithesis after he co-wrote a book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, borrowing Lippmann's term, in 1979. But Lippman actually had a critic in his own time, the philosopher John Dewey, who may have agreed with Lippmann's assertions that the modern world was becoming too complex for every citizen to grasp all its aspects, but Dewey believed that the mass public could form a "Great Community" that could become educated about issues, come to judgments and arrive at solutions to societal problems, especially with the help of an "objective" press.

But much of that debate has been lost today, in part because Dewey was a lousy writer whose work is so dense that it is nearly impossible to read today. Lippmann's caving in on that issue, I believe to further his own publishing career with the new class of media moguls, contributed to a new, non-scientific, capitalist definition of objectivity that came to dominate our stereotypical thinking about the press.

Who can deny that Rush Limbaugh's bashing of "the liberal press" came to dominate our discussions? It permeates the debate on cable television news today, and it is a perfect example of what Lippmann was worried about in his early years. Most of the uneducated masses in this country hold a picture in their heads of a "liberal press," and the word liberal has been demonized to be seen as something just as bad as Communism or Socialism - or eating spinach.

Popeye tried to make eating spinach a good thing, but somehow it didn't work.

But Limbaugh's bashing of the "liberal media" did work. It was taken up by conservative commentators everywhere, and so the publishers of newspapers used it as an excuse to march steadily rightward, starting in earnest in the 1980s just as I was embarking on a career with aspirations of becoming an "investigative reporter."

Even in those days, the glow of the Washington Post's grand achievement in Watergate had faded, and in the American South, the only investigative reporting allowed was the kind that served corporate, Republican interests.

Who can forget how the Birmingham News sent a photographer (who I have known all my life) to hide in the bushes in 1986 and spy on Bill Baxley? The news trumped up a scandal against George Wallace's heir apparent Democrat and reported that Baxley was using a state car to run for governor against Charlie "fry 'em 'till their eyes pop out" Graddick, a Republican from Mobile masquerading as a Democrat so he could get elected. It turned out not to be a state car after all, but the damage had been done.

In walks old chicken farmer, Amway salesman and Primitive Baptist preacher Guy Hunt, who should have been indicted instead of elected for using a federal office to run for governor. Of course, he was never investigated by the U.S. Attorney in Montgomery at that time, a Reagan appointee. Sound familiar? And he was never investigated by the Birmingham Ruse.

You can read all about it in David Burnham's book, in which I am quoted, on the Justice Department, comparing the Hunt case to the investigation of former Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington.

There is another newspaper publisher who should be mentioned here, even though I've not had the time or resources to fully investigate it.

Adolph Ochs, the former publisher of a paper in Chattanooga, Tennessee who went on to buy out and transform the New York Times into a great objective newspaper starting in 1898, had some ideas about objectivity in his day that transcended merely making a lot of money by printing both sides of stories. I am not aware of any scholar who has fully investigated this, but one day I would like to get into his papers, and the papers of other publishers of the time when Charles Darwin was still alive, and see just what they were thinking about using the press as a vehicle for educating the public, especially as it concerned science.

That is the strain of intellectual thought that most interests me, and I think it has been lost. As a result, the very idea of Democracy is in grave peril.

And I don't give a hoot what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says about how Democracy and the Republic and the New York Times will always be around. I'm sure it honestly looks that way if you are living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan making $1.2 million a year to write two measly newspaper columns a week.

Come on down to Alabama, Ms. Dowd, and I will show you a totalitarian system right here in the good old US of A. I can introduce you to poor people living in the woods who would just like something to eat, a warm (or cool) place to sleep and maybe some health care for their children. Try telling them Democracy is alive and working in Bush's America.

Now to wrap up this tale with a local example of why I think people basically get it without too much help from elites. They do need real political leadership, but it doesn't take much to convince them - if the press would just try.

After the hearing on selective prosecutions by the House Judiciary Committee the other day, a friend of mine (and a member of the focus group for this independant news site) took a trip to Tennessee. While there, she ended up in a little country store and overheard a conversation by a group of old men. They had only read the AP that day on the hearing and the controversy over Don Siegelman, but they understood it without a lot of editorial analysis.

She overheard them talking about all the good things Siegelman had done for the poor people of Alabama, locating auto plants out in the country with all those good paying jobs. And, they had no doubt the prosecution of Siegelman was done for political reasons by the Bush Justice Department. They got it.

It's the management of papers like the Birmingham Snooze that don't get it. Do you think that may be why they are losing readers and subscrbers? They like to blame bloggers.

But just maybe it's that we are more willing to tell the truth and write wide open, interesting stuff, stories worth reading.