The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, September 1, 2024

Editorial notebook: In 1962 the American historian Daniel Boorstin published The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, a book that analyzing the replacement of news with the packaging of manufactured news events, from so-called “press releases,” better referred to as handouts, to “press conferences,” to other productions manipulating the press to predetermined end. It’s gotten much worse since. “In 1947,” he wrote, “there were about twice as many government press agents engaged in preparing news releases as there were newsmen gathering them in.” If you just look at Flagler County, a few of the local governments or agencies–Palm Coast, the county, the sheriff, the school board–have no fewer than a dozen people in their “marketing and communications” divisions between them, or about three times the number of reporters seriously covering the county. We daily swim in floods of “releases” and manufactured events anywhere you look, not just locally. The Kamala Harris interview on CNN a few days ago was, primarily, one of those pseudo events. It should not have been news. An interview with a presidential candidate should not in and of itself be the news. It should be routine, an almost everyday thing, front-paged only by the outfit that may have that day’s interview, if even then. Woodrow Wilson had his issues as a president, but he literally allowed the public to walk in and out of the executive branches and the White House to see officials in action, and instituted the first press conferences: “At 12:45 on March 15, 1913,” A. Scott Berg writes in his 2013 biography of Wilson, “the Wilson Administration made history when it established what would become a convention of the Presidency. That Saturday afternoon, [presidential secretary Joseph] Tumulty ushered 125 members of the press corps into Wilson’s office; and for the first time, a President held a White House press conference. Wilson was hardly the first President to talk to a journalist, indeed, Taft met occasionally with newspapermen after hours and granted them a few minutes of questions; and TR cherry-picked members of his “newspaper cabinet,” allowing them to transcribe what he chose to dictate. To promote government transparency, Wilson announced that he intended to schedule regular conferences at which any journalist could ask whatever he wanted.” FDR and LBJ were always surrounded by reporters, though each also waged war on the press in his own way (as did Obama). Even Trump, for that matter, though he surrounds himself with sycophants. Still. He’s doing a better job of granting access than Harris, who’s moved into the cocoon Biden lived in for the duration of the 2020 campaign, with Covid as his excuse. She has no excuse. She’s hiding, which is a shame. The CNN interview was not enlightening, other than to highlight the distance between her and the press, what’s left of it, and the arrogance of candidates we now accept as normal. Of course Harris is the better candidate. That’s not in question. Amoebas and bacteria are better candidates than Trump. But if Harris is defeated, as still appears to be more likely than not, this distance, this Clintonian arrogance we thought she was past, will be among the reasons.

—P.T.

The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves. Pseudo-events from their very nature tend to be more interesting and more attractive than spontaneous events. Therefore in American public life today pseudo-events tend to drive all other kinds of events out of our consciousness, or at least to overshadow them. Earnest, well-informed citizens seldom notice that their experience of spontaneous events is buried by pseudo-events. Yet nowadays, the more industriously they work at “informing” themselves the more this tends to be true.

–From Daniel Boorstin’s The Image (1962).

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