The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

"Boorstin’s political perspective is conservative, but as a media critic he introduced one of the most significant concepts for understanding, not only our media-saturated culture in general, but the abuses of right-wing television, such as FOX. Boorstin was prescient; he saw things that became truer and truer decades after he wrote about them. I am extremely interested in the power of imagery and the way that created images, both visual and narrative, have become more convincing than fact for us. Boorstin was one of the first social commentators to talk about this. His concept of the ‘pseudo-event’ is one that I have found incredibly useful in teaching and thinking over the years. A pseudo-event is something that acquires its reality and power not because it is based on fact, but simply because the media has reported it, repeated it, exaggerated it, re-played it, made a mantra of it. A good example is Richard Jewell, who was wrongly accused of being the pipe bomber at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. All we heard about for weeks was the duct tape found under his bed, as news commentators had apparently decided this was evidence of his guilt. No real evidence against him existed, but such a compelling story was told by the media that I believe many people today still think he was the bomber. Another example is the kind of reporting that happened during Hurricane Katrina. From press reports and selective, sensationalizing, racially-inflected images during the first week after the hurricane, we were given this widespread notion that there were huge numbers of black looters and rapists roaming the streets of New Orleans. Not . It was a pseudo-event, a media concoction. I think he would be both stunned and feel vindicated. Today, the pseudo-event rules the air-waves, especially on the rolling news channels where leaks are immediately turned into news stories and endlessly repeated because they have to fill up airtime – and to suit their political agendas, as with the FOX news network. Obama’s entire presidency as told by FOX has been one long series of pseudo-events. Boorstin also talks about the human pseudo-event, which is essentially the creation of celebrities whose fame is due neither to talent or any other special quality but simply to the fact that they become well-known. Sound familiar? Boorstin nailed this before the emergence of reality television and the full flowering of celebrity culture. He clearly put his finger on some cultural trends which have really gone stratospheric in recent years."