Too Much Lipp form Lippmann

First and foremost I must address Walter Lippmann's writing style. I'm sure that he could have gotten a really great job writing stereo instructions for RCA, but instead he went the academic route so all of us could fall asleep a little easier each night. Maybe he was employed by a lesser known Serta, and was the inspiration behind the counting sheep...the world may never know.
Now looking at what Lippmann was trying to say: The basic idea is that the media controls all of the "pictures in our heads" and that the common public is not intelligent or perceptive enough to figure things out for themselves. He offers a philosophical option by employing an "intelligensia" which is a higher order of people who are educated about culture, politics, and media savvy.
While this may sound like a cracked out idea, if you look at it from tody's perspective, isn't that sort of already employed? We are controlled what to think about by the gatekeeper's agenda setting ways and the hyper reality that they create by making things more important than they really are. While some may say that we are only exposed to what we want to be exposed to, who decides what we get to choose to expose ourselves to? Books, magazines, television, and movies are all forms of media that are in the public for a profit. They are all owned by huge companies that are pushing their own agendas and have powerful friends that don't want people to think about certain things (Ahem, sugarcane run cars?) so they expose us to other things to distract us from reality.
Most easily this can be viewed as a part of the conflict theory where as big media is in the powerful position and the citizens are the powerless. There seems to be no way for the public to reverse the structure because as lippmann says, there really is no democracy, which I wholeheartedly believe. We are living in the biggest scam in the world and there's no way out. Welcome to America, the land of no free healh care, oil-dependant, and soon to be corn-crazy. Ridiculous.