Study On Walter Lippmann And His Pubic Opinion

American columnist Walter Lippmann' Public Opinion published in 1922 was a masterpiece which covered many disciplines such as journalism, mass communication, political science, social psychology and PR. This dissertation is the first comprehensive and thematic study on Lippmann's very book on the mainland so far, and deems that as what is formulated in this book Lippmann was a forerunner to articulate and shape the communication as a distinct intellectual and academic theme. His description of communication as a empirical, intentional, one-way, effect-orientated message transmission had an deep influence on the American empirical communication research for 50 years ever since. Much mainstream empirical communications research traced its origins back to Lippmann. Lippmann was the first writer to introduce the phrase "stereotype" into psychological realm, and which lately had become a key word of social psychology. And also he is one of the earlist scholars to advocate professionalization and objectivity and interpretive report of journalism, and one of the pioneers of public relation practice and theory. At the rear part of the article the author discusses the problem existed in the research on the topic of public opinion on the mainland.