Daniel J. Boorstin

Discusses news gathering, celebrity, travel, prestige, and the American dream

A Guide to Pseudo-events in America

The Image

Conor Murphy

F.D.R. was a man of great warmth, natural spontaneity, and simple eloquence, and his public utterances reached the citizen with a new intimacy. Yet, paradoxically, it was under his administrations that statements by the President attained a new subtlety and a new calculatedness. On his production team, in addition to newspapermen, there were poets, playwrights, and a regular corps of speech writers. Far from detracting from his effectiveness, this collaborative system for producing the impression of personal frankness and spontaneity provided an additional subject of newsworthy interest. Was it Robert Sherwood or Judge Samuel Rosenman who contributed this or that phrase? How much had the President revised the draft given him by his speech-writing team? Citizens became nearly as much interested in how a particular speech was put together as in what it said. And when the President spoke, almost everyone knew it was a long-planned group production in which F.D.R. was only the star performer.

The live television broadcasting of the President's regular news conferences, which President Kennedy began in 1961, immediately after taking office, has somewhat changed their character. Newsmen are no longer so important as intermediaries who relay the President's statements.

Then came round-the-clock media. The news gap soon became so narrow that in order to have additional "news” for each new edition or each new broadcast it was necessary to plan in advance the stages by which any available news would be unveiled. After the weekly and the daily came the "extras" and the numerous regular editions. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin soon had seven editions a day. No rest for the newsman. With more space to fill, he had to fill it ever more quickly. In order to justify the numerous editions, it was increasingly necessary that the news constantly change or at least seem to change. With radio on the air continuously during waking hours, the reporters' problems became still more acute. News every hour on the hour, and sometimes on the half hour. Programs interrupted any time for special bulletins. How to avoid deadly repetition, the appearance that nothing was happening, that news gatherers were asleep, or that competitors were more alert? As the costs of printing and then of broadcasting increased, it became financially necesary to keep the presses always at work and the TV screen always busy. Pressures toward the making of pseudo-events became ever stronger. News gathering turned into news making.

The Grand Canyon itself became a disappointing reproduction of the Kodachrome original.

Hannah Yang

Still (disturbingly) relevant book that discusses just about every aspect of our unreal experiences through the all-encompassing frame of pseudoevents. For each facet of pseudoevents that Boorstin identified and unveiled, I could think of dozens of recent examples exemplifying their iridescent ambiguity / confounding comforts. Honestly, I think reading The Image and similar books is essential for coming to terms with (learning to see past the illusion that we have defeated illusion??) the world we live in because, after all, "each of us must emancipate himself [...] by the law of pseudoevents, all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions."

The Image A Guide to Pseudo-events in America

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