Daniel J. Boorstin's 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America is, in the words of the author, "about our arts of self-deception, how we hide reality from ourselves. One need not be a doctor to know he is sick, nor a shoemaker to feel the shoe pinch. I do not know what 'reality' really is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one" (p. iii, The Image).
Boorstin explains how society engages in deception and self-deception (pp. 3-4):
In this book I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life. I recount historical forces which have given us this unprecedented opportunity to deceive ourselves and to befog our experience...
We want and believe these illusions because we suffer from extravagant expectations...
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for "excellence," to be made literate by appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to "a church of our choice" and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and be God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
Boorstin's commentary is an insightful analysis of the human tendency to always want more, combined with the human capacity--and hunger--for self-deception. The rapid technological developments of the past 64 years since Boorstin's book was published--particularly in terms of computing power and communication--have significantly augmented both tendencies: a child growing up today expects to be continuously entertained, and in general expects instant gratification, because computers, cellphones, and the internet create the illusion that anything and everything that we want can and should be immediately accessible.
Boorstin notes that the traditional expectation of news reporters was that they would report on significant events that happened; if nothing significant happened, "He could not be expected to report what did not exist" (p. 8). Boorstin observes that in the twentieth century, the expectation of what a news reporter should do shifted dramatically: "If he cannot find a story, then he must make one--by the questions he asks of public figures, by the surprising human interest he unfolds from some commonplace event, or by 'the news behind the news'" (p. 8). Boorstin adds, "Demanding more than the world can give us, we require that something be fabricated to make up for the world's deficiency" (p. 9). Boorstin calls these fabrications "pseudo-events," a neologism based on the Greek word "pseudo," which means false.
The incessant attempt to create news and excitement where no news and no excitement exists can be observed in the ridiculous questions asked by many reporters at basketball games, at the World Chess Championship, and at almost any press conference pertaining to politics or public affairs.
Boorstin lists four characteristics of a pseudo-event (p. 11):
1) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
2) It is planted primarily (but not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced...The question "Is it real?" is less important than, "Is it newsworthy?"
3) Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous...
4) Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy...
Regarding the fourth characteristic, Boorstin cites an example provided by Edward L. Bernays in Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923). Bernays describes a situation in which the owners of a hotel seek to increase their hotel's prestige and boost its business, but instead of making tangible improvements to the hotel's operations they hire a public relations firm to stage a pseudo-event: a celebration of the hotel's 30th anniversary. The purpose of this pseudo-event is to create the illusion that this hotel is prestigious.
Boorstin explains how the focus of news coverage shifted from reporting about events to creating pseudo-events. He writes about this in the context of the rapid evolution of newspapers, radio, and television in the 20th century, but the process he describes can also be observed in modern media outlets and in the ever expanding array of social media outlets in the 21st century (p. 14):
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...In order to justify the numerous editions, it was increasingly necessary that the news constantly change or at least seem to change...News gathering turned into news making.
Boorstin singles out President Franklin Roosevelt as "the first modern master" (p. 20) of using media outlets to create pseudo-events suiting his purposes, and Boorstin notes that Senator Joseph McCarthy built his career almost entirely on pseudo-events; for example, McCarthy would hold a morning press conference just to say that he planned to make a big announcement at his afternoon press conference, but then if he had nothing to announce he would state at his afternoon press conference that he did not yet have all of the documents needed for his announcement. In this way, he kept his name in the news cycle, as the media outlets would breathlessly report about each press conference even if those press conferences were pseudo-events devoid of any news pertaining to an actual event.
Boorstin describes how television coverage of General General MacArthur's "triumphal" journey around the country in 1951 provided a distorted impression of how crowds reacted (pp. 26-28); in this way, media outlets shape public opinion and sentiment instead of reporting about it. Referring to how some reporters inflame violence so that they have something to broadcast and then defend their right to engage in such dishonest tactics based on "freedom of the press," Boorstin comments that freedom of the press "is often a euphemism for the prerogative of reporters to produce their synthetic commodity" (p. 29).
Boorstin distinguishes pseudo-events from propaganda: "While a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood. Pseudo-events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to 'have all the facts,' and even to have more facts than there really are. But propaganda feeds on our willingness to be inflamed" (p. 34). However, according to those definitions the coverage of General MacArthur described above should be classified as propaganda, not a pseudo-event. Regarding the current practices of both legacy media outlets and social media influencers, the line separating pseudo-events from propaganda--if it ever existed--is blurred beyond recognition; today's media outlets and social media platforms operate on a non-stop, 24 hour cycle during which they regularly create pseudo-events, and it is apparent that these pseudo-events are produced not just to inform (or to feed the audience's appetite to be informed) but also to inflame in a way that matches what Boorstin deems to be propaganda: TV's "debate shows" are not about a genuine exchange of ideas for the purpose of informing the audience but rather about a producer screaming "Conflict!" in the earphones of the panelists to goad them to argue, which inevitably creates more heat than light. A more dangerous and pernicious example of using video footage to inflame viewers' passions is staging incidents and then filming those incidents to give a false impression
of what is really happening, a technique that is often used in Israel to both denigrate Israelis and to create a false narrative of "Palestinian victimhood"; the disingenuous techniques used to film the movie "No Other Land" are examples of inflammatory propaganda.
The emerging dominance of social media outlets and streaming over broadcast television and print media has accelerated the process of creating both pseudo-events and propaganda at the expense of accurately reporting facts and news. Both pseudo-events and propaganda involve crafting a narrative that often diverges from the facts. I wrote about Narratives Versus Reality in the pro basketball context:
Narratives often overshadow reality regarding player evaluations. During Kobe Bryant's career, an evergreen narrative was when/if Bryant would evolve to become a team player. One such article declared "Kobe Bryant has grown into a consummate team player." The writer quoted Larry Brown, who called Bryant "a model" of what an NBA player should be, and in that same article one of Bryant's teammates said of Bryant, "He doesn't make his game a personal game anymore. You don't see him doing the things on the floor that used to get him in trouble and get us in trouble." You might assume that the article is from the 2008-2010 time frame, when Bryant led the Lakers to three straight Finals appearances and back to back titles--but the article is from 2000, prior to Bryant winning three championships alongside Shaquille O'Neal.The larger point that extends beyond the pro basketball context is that media members often create narratives supporting a particular agenda that they are promoting. The narrative supersedes facts and supplants truth.
Once the media labels a player, team, or situation a certain way, that label often sticks, and then becomes the template for future stories. The media labeled Bryant a bad teammate early in his career, and that narrative stuck. Then, media members could choose the "Bryant is now becoming a good teammate" story template or they could stick with the "Bryant has never been/will never be a good teammate" story template. Far too many Bryant stories blindly followed one of those templates, without digging deeper to find the truth.
As Fred Carter told me for one of the first stories that I wrote about Bryant, "For some people perception is reality. The echoed word becomes the accepted word. It becomes the choice phrase. But he won titles and he does get the assists. He does get steals and he does get blocks. He's not a guy who just plays on the offensive end. What happens is that people have the tendency to echo the words of everyone else. It's unfortunate."
Such narratives are often created from a pseudo-event and then disseminated by other pseudo-events. A quintessential example of a pseudo-event is a debate between Presidential candidates. Boorstin's description of the series of "Great Debates" between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 is applicable to such debates in general: "The drama of the situation was mostly specious, or at least had an extremely ambiguous relevance to the main (but forgotten) issue: which participant was better qualified for the Presidency. Of course, a man's ability, while standing under klieg lights, without notes, to answer in two and a half minutes a question kept secret until that moment had only the most dubious relevance--if any at all--to his real qualifications to make deliberate Presidential decisions after being instructed by a corps of advisors" (p. 42). Each Presidential debate pseudo-event is inevitably followed by a host of pseduo-events with various commentators debating and discussing how well or how poorly each Presidential candidate performed--and each political party uses these subsequent pseudo-events to compose a narrative that suits its goals and purposes.
Boorstin asserts that until recent times fame and greatness tended to be synonymous: the path to fame was to achieve greatness. The proliferation of media outlets--and, within the past 20 years or so, social media platforms--has not only increased the number of pseudo-events that receive significant coverage but it has also made it possible to become famous simply for being famous without accomplishing anything great. Boorstin explains (emphasis in the original), "The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness...He is neither good nor bad, great nor petty. He is the human pseudo-event" (p. 57). Our society has become oversaturated with such human pseudo-events, and the attention and admiration directed to these people is to the detriment of people and events of actual significance and meaning; instead of living lives of purpose and service, media outlets influence us to focus our attention and energy on the superficial and the banal while pretending that celebrities and pseudo-events are imbued with meaning and relevance, when in fact the opposite is true.
Shifting gears to a different but related topic, Boorstin distinguishes travel from tourism. He notes that in old English the word travel had the same meaning as travail (trouble, work, or torment): "To journey--to 'travail,' or (later) to travel--then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work" (p. 85). In contrast, a tourist--first hyphenated as tour-ist--is defined in one dictionary as "a person who makes a tour, especially for pleasure," and the word was "derived by back-formation from the Latin tornus, which in turn came from the Greek word for a tool describing a circle. The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker" (p. 85). Boorstin notes that a traveler actively seeks adventure, while a tourist passively expects things to happen, and he adds, "Thus foreign travel ceased to be an activity--an experience, an undertaking--and instead became a commodity" (p. 85).
A traveler seeks to learn about and experience native culture, while a tourist expects to be entertained with something that matches preconceived notions about that culture. Boorstin concludes, "Here again, the pseudo-event overshadows the spontaneous...We go more and more where we expect to go. We get money-back guarantees that we will see what we expect to see. Anyway, we go more and more, not to see at all, but only to take pictures...Whether we seek models of greatness, or experience elsewhere on the earth, we look into a mirror instead of out a window, and we see only ourselves" (p. 117).
Adapting, translating, and mass producing works of art is a modern phenomenon. Boorstin explains, "The 'original' had a priceless and ineffable uniqueness...Approximation was never enough...The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Graphic Revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have done much to change this. If art and literature were to be made accessible to all, they had to be made intelligible (and inoffensive) to all. Popularity was then often bought at the cost of the integrity of the original work. With the rise of liberalism came the rise of the vernacular languages and literatures. Now the common people could read great works in their own market-place English, French, German, Spanish, or Italian, instead of having to know the learned languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in which classical authors had written" (pp. 119-120).
Much as pseudo-events have replaced events, what one might call "pseudo-art" has replaced art, as great works are edited, emended, and expurgated to become better suited for mass consumption: "Popularity became confused with universality. If the Bible was truly an inspired Great Book, it must have something to say to everyone; by a quaint reversal, it then became axiomatic that anyone could understand the Bible. In the twentieth century, our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa" (pp. 121-122).
Boorstin adds, "The same technological advances which account for modern journalism and for the flood of political pseudo-events also account for the flood of magazines and books" (p. 131). Now, the flood of political pseudo-events is amplified by the flood of information--and misinformation--pouring from social media outlets 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Boorstin is particularly critical regarding the increasing prevalence of digests and abridgements: "There is no better clue than the rise of The Reader's Digest to the dissolution of forms and to the increasing secondhandness of our experience in twentieth century America. This, the most popular magazine in the United States, has offered itself not as an 'original,' but as a digest. The shadow outsells the substance. Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance" (p. 133).
What happened next set the stage for the deceptive way that modern media outlets operate (p. 135):
Then, by the inexorable law of pseudo-events, The Reader's Digest began to spawn other pseudo-events. [Founder De Witt] Wallace himself later described this innovation as "an inevitable development, perhaps the most important in the Digest's history." Like all great inventions, the idea was beautifully simple. It was merely to "plant" a full-length article (prepared under Reader's Digest direction) in some other magazine, so it could afterwards be digested in The Reader's Digest. The editors of the Digest would conceive a two-page piece for their own magazine. Instead of directly writing the two-page article themselves, they would commission an author to prepare on this topic a "full-length" article--say, five times the length of the predestined Digest abridgment. This proposed article--sometimes even before it was written--was then accepted by some other magazine, which would print it among its regular contents. The Digest paid for the whole process, including the full-length original. Here, of course, was a perfect example of a literary pseudo-event.
It did not take long before more than half of The Reader's Digest's content was not abridged versions of original content that had been published elsewhere--the purported purpose for The Reader's Digest's existence--but instead content that had been produced specifically to appear in The Reader's Digest, foreshadowing the way that mass media content is deceptively produced now. This kind of practice--creating a "pseudo-event" and then treating it as an important news event--saturates not just social media platforms but also the traditional mainstream media outlets. Content is not just king, but slave master, and platforms feel compelled to generate (or invent) content to spike ratings and encourage advertisers to spend money.
Another method for transforming the high art of literature to low art more suitable for mass consumption is adapting a book into a movie. As movies became a prevalent form of entertainment, the "star system" emerged, and Boorstin's biting commentary about the "star system" is relevant today not only for movies but also for social media's galaxy of "stars" (p. 154):
"Stars" were the celebrities of the entertainment world. Like other celebrities, they were to be distinguished by their well-knownness more than by any other quality. In them, as in other celebrities, fame and notoriety were thoroughly confused. Their hallmark was simply and primarily their prominence in popular consciousness, and it made very little difference how this publicity was secured.
In the "star system," the intrinsic artistic merit of a book or movie is irrelevant; what matters is how well known a book or movie is: "A best seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well" (p. 164). Moreover, "To speak of a best seller--to use the superlative to apply not to one item but to a score of items--is, of course, a logical contradiction...The factual basis for calling any book a best seller is not so much a statistic as an amalgam including a small ingredient of fact along with much larger ingredients of hope, intention, frustration, ballyhoo, and pure hokum" (p. 165).
Boorstin quotes James D. Hart to explain why best selling books are unlikely to have enduring value (p. 167):
The book that time judges to be great is occasionally also the book popular in its own period; but, by and large, the longer-lived work reflects the demands of the moment only in the most general sense. Usually the book that is popular pleases the reader because it is shaped by the same forces that mold his non-reading hours, so that its dispositions and convictions, its language and subject, re-create the sense of the present, to die away as soon as that present becomes the past. Books of that sort generally are unreadable for succeeding ages.
That paragraph describes much of the written material that is published today not just in books, but also in magazines, and online articles. Writers who are famous for being famous are producing "content" of low quality that succeeding generations will find not just unreadable but also uninteresting.
The "star system" is evident not just in the entertainment world but in many other spheres, including politics: "National politics (with the full paraphernalia of make-up, rehearsals, and klieg lights) has adopted the star system which dominates it more with every election" (p. 168). Partisan advocates for a particular political party will be certain that Boorstin's prophesy only applies to the political party that they oppose, but in fact Boorstin predicted the overall coarsening of our political discourse and the triumph of style over substance in our political system, not the rise or fall of a particular political party.
Boorstin notes a significant consequence of prioritizing style over substance (p. 182):
...we have emptied the word "value." We have moved away from a traditional meaning found in older dictionaries: "Value...Ethics. That which is worthy of esteem for its own sake; that which has intrinsic worth." Toward a newer and more American meaning: "Value...pl. in sociology, acts, customs, institutions, etc. regarded in a particular, especially favorable, way by a people, ethnic group, etc." Our new social scientists speak of "values" all the time. By it they mean the peculiar standards which a society has made for itself. By it they reassure us that we need not worry over the dissolution of ideals, since all ideals are obsolete. The most "civilized" peoples, in fact, are those who know they are guided by values of their own making.
A society based on ideals and values is built on solid bedrock; a society based on images and pseudo-events is built on shifting sands.
Boorstin suggests that there has been a societal shift "from an emphasis on 'truth' to an emphasis on 'credibility'" (p. 212). He adds, "What seems important is not truth but verisimilitude...Finding a fact is easy; making a fact 'believed' is slightly more difficult" (id.). We see this often in agenda-driven media coverage that focuses not on truth and not on facts, but on the preferred narratives of various media outlets: they want their consumers to believe specific things--and their consumers are often inclined to want to believe those things as well--so they present information not grounded in facts but made to seem credible: it does not matter to these media outlets if an event happened the way that they portrayed it happening but rather that their audience finds the portrayal to be credible and aligned with their opinions/biases.
It is easy to recognize that Boorstin's analysis of pseudo-events is even more relevant now than it was in the 1960s, but it should not be surprising that many people only see part of the picture--the part that reflects favorably on their beliefs and their preferred narratives; if you think that Boorstin's book is only about the political party, narratives, and media outlets that you do not like then you have missed the book's point. We are being bombarded by delusions and illusions from multiple directions; the focus of contemporary mass communication systems is not to broadcast truth or spread knowledge, but to inflame emotions in a way that attracts attention and generates revenue.
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