The Image (5 page)
Authors: Daniel J. Boorstin
The pressure of time, and the need to produce a uniform news stream to fill the issuing media, induce Washington correspondents and others to use the interview and other techniques for making pseudo-events in novel, ever more ingenious and aggressive ways. One of the main facts of life for the wire service reporter in Washington is that there are many more afternoon than morning papers in the United States. The early afternoon paper on the East Coast goes to press about 10
A.M
., before the spontaneous news of the day has had an opportunity to develop. “It means,” one conscientious capital correspondent confides, in Douglass Cater’s admirable
Fourth Branch of Government
(1959), “the wire service reporter must engage in the basically phony operation of writing the ‘overnight’—a story composed the previous evening but giving the impression when it appears the next afternoon that it covers that day’s events.”
What this can mean in a particular case is illustrated by the tribulations of a certain hard-working reporter who was trying to do his job and earn his keep at the time when the Austrian Treaty of 1955 came up for debate in the Senate. Although it was a matter of some national and international importance, the adoption of the Treaty was a foregone conclusion; there would be little news in it. So, in order to make a story, this reporter went to Senator Walter George, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and extracted a statement to the effect that under the Treaty Austria would receive no money or military aid, only long-term credits. “That became my lead,” the reporter recalled. “I had fulfilled the necessary function of having a story that seemed
to be part of the next day’s news.”
The next day, the Treaty came up for debate. The debate was dull, and it was hard to squeeze out a story. Luckily, however, Senator Jenner made a nasty crack about President Eisenhower, which the reporter (after considering what other wire service reporters covering the story might be doing) sent off as an “insert.” The Treaty was adopted by the Senate a little after 3:30
P.M
. That automatically made a bulletin and required a new lead for the story on the debate. But by that time the hard-pressed reporter was faced with writing a completely new story for the next day’s morning papers.
But my job had not finished. The Treaty adoption bulletin had gone out too late to get into most of the East Coast afternoon papers except the big city ones like the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin
, which has seven editions. I had to find a new angle for an overnight to be carried next day by those
P.M.’S
which failed to carry the Treaty story.
They don’t want to carry simply a day-old account of the debate. They want a “top” to the news. So, to put it quite bluntly, I went and got Senator Thye to say that Jenner by his actions was weakening the President’s authority. Actually, the Thye charge was more lively news than the passage of the Austrian Treaty itself. It revealed conflict among the Senate Republicans. But the story had developed out of my need for a new peg for the news. It was not spontaneous on Thye’s part. I had called seven other Senators before I could get someone to make a statement on Jenner. There is a fair criticism, I recognize, to be made of this practice. These Senators didn’t call me. I called them. I, in a sense, generated the news. The reporter’s imagination brought the Senator’s thinking to bear on alternatives that he might not have thought of by himself.
This can be a very pervasive practice. One wire service reporter hounded Senator George daily on the foreign
trade question until he finally got George to make the suggestion that Japan should trade with Red China as an alternative to dumping textiles on the American market. Then the reporter went straightway to Senator Knowland to get him to knock down the suggestion. It made a good story, and it also stimulated a minor policy debate that might not have got started otherwise. The “overnight” is the greatest single field for exploratory reporting for the wire services. It is what might be called “milking the news.”
The reporter shrewdly adds that the task of his profession today is seldom to compose accounts of the latest events at lightning speed. Rather, it is shaped by “the problem of packaging.” He says: “Our job is to report the news but it is also to keep a steady flow of news coming forward. Every Saturday morning, for example, we visit the Congressional leaders. We could write all the stories that we get out of these conferences for the Sunday
A.M.’S
but we don’t. We learn to schedule them in order to space them out over Sunday’s and Monday’s papers.”
An innocent observer might have expected that the rise of television and on-the-spot telecasting of the news would produce a pressure to report authentic spontaneous events exactly as they occur. But, ironically, these, like earlier improvements in the techniques of precise representation, have simply created more and better pseudo-events.
When General Douglas MacArthur returned to the United States (after President Truman relieved him of command in the Far East, on April 11, 1951, during the Korean War) he made a “triumphal” journey around the country. He was invited to help Chicago celebrate “MacArthur Day” (April 26, 1951) which had been proclaimed by resolution of the City Council. Elaborate ceremonies were arranged, including a parade. The proceedings were being televised.
A team of thirty-one University of Chicago sociologists, under the imaginative direction of Kurt Lang, took their
posts at strategic points along the route of the MacArthur parade. The purpose was to note the reactions of the crowd and to compare what the spectators were seeing (or said they were seeing) with what they might have witnessed on television. This ingenious study confirmed my observation that we tend increasingly to fill our experience with contrived content. The newspapers had, of course, already prepared people for what the Chicago
Tribune
that morning predicted to be “a triumphant hero’s welcome—biggest and warmest in the history of the middle west.” Many of the actual spectators jammed in the crowd at the scene complained it was hard to see what was going on; in some places they waited for hours and then were lucky to have a fleeting glimpse of the General.
But the television perspective was quite different. The video viewer had the advantage of numerous cameras which were widely dispersed. Television thus ordered the events in its own way, quite different from that of the on-the-spot confusion. The cameras were carefully focused on “significant” happenings—that is, those which emphasized the drama of the occasion. For the television watcher, the General was the continuous center of attraction from his appearance during the parade at 2:21
P.M
. until the sudden blackout at 3:00
P.M
. Announcers continually reiterated (the scripts showed over fifteen explicit references) the unprecedented drama of the event, or that this was “the greatest ovation this city has ever turned out.” On the television screen one received the impression of wildly cheering and enthusiastic crowds before, during, and after the parade. Of course the cameras were specially selecting “action” shots, which showed a noisy, waving audience; yet in many cases the cheering, waving, and shouting were really a response not so much to the General as to the aiming of the camera. Actual spectators, with sore feet, suffered long periods of boredom. Many groups were apathetic. The video viewer, his eyes fixed alternately on the General and on an enthusiastic crowd, his ears filled with a breathless narrative emphasizing
the interplay of crowd and celebrity, could not fail to receive an impression of continuous dramatic pageantry.
The most important single conclusion of these sociologists was that the television presentation (as contrasted with the actual witnessing) of the events “remained true to form until the very end, interpreting the entire proceedings according to expectations.… The telecast was made to conform to what was interpreted as the pattern of viewers’ expectations.” Actual spectators at the scene were doubly disappointed, not only because they usually saw very little (and that only briefly) from where they happened to be standing, but also because they knew they were missing a much better performance (with far more of the drama they expected) on the television screen. “I bet my wife saw it much better over television!” and “We should have stayed home and watched it on TV” were the almost universal forms of dissatisfaction. While those at the scene were envying the viewers of the pseudo-event back home, the television viewers were, of course, being told again and again by the network commentators how great was the excitement of being “actually present.”
Yet, as the Chicago sociologists noted, for many of those actually present one of the greatest thrills of the day was the opportunity to be on television. Just as everybody likes to see his name in the newspapers, so nearly everybody likes to think that he can be seen (or still better, with the aid of videotape, actually can see himself) on television. Similarly, reporters following candidates Kennedy and Nixon during their tours in the 1960 Presidential campaign noted how many of the “supporters” in the large crowds that were being televised had come out because they wanted to be seen on the television cameras.
Television reporting allows us all to be the actors we really are. Recently I wandered onto the campus of the University of Chicago and happened to witness a tug of war between teams of students. It was amusing to see the women’s team drench the men’s team by pulling them into Botany Pond.
Television cameras of the leading networks were there. The victory of the women’s team seemed suspiciously easy to me. I was puzzled until told that this was not the original contest at all; the real tug of war had occurred a day or two before when telecasting conditions were not so good. This was a re-enactment for television.
On December 2, 1960, during the school integration disorders in New Orleans, Mayor de Lesseps S. Morrison wrote a letter to newsmen proposing a three-day moratorium on news and television coverage of the controversy. He argued that the printed and televised reports were exaggerated and were damaging the city’s reputation and its tourist trade. People were given an impression of prevailing violence, when, he said, only one-tenth of 1 per cent of the population had been involved in the demonstration. But he also pointed out that the mere presence of telecasting facilities was breeding disorder. “In many cases,” he observed, “these people go to the area to get themselves on television and hurry home for the afternoon and evening telecasts to see the show.” At least two television reporters had gone about the crowd interviewing demonstrators with inflammatory questions like “Why are you opposed to intermarriage?” Mayor Morrison said he himself had witnessed a television cameraman “setting up a scene,” and then, having persuaded a group of students to respond like a “cheering section,” had them yell and demonstrate on cue. The conscientious reporters indignantly rejected the Mayor’s proposed moratorium on news. They said that “Freedom of the Press” was at stake. That was once an institution preserved in the interest of the community. Now it is often a euphemism for the prerogative of reporters to produce their synthetic commodity.
I
N MANY
subtle ways, the rise of pseudo-events has mixed up our roles as actors and as audience—or, the philosophers
would say, as “object” and as “subject.” Now we can oscillate between the two roles. “The movies are the only business,” Will Rogers once remarked, “where you can go out front and applaud yourself.” Nowadays one need not be a professional actor to have this satisfaction. We can appear in the mob scene and then go home and see ourselves on the television screen. No wonder we become confused about what is spontaneous, about what is really going on out there!
New forms of pseudo-events, especially in the world of politics, thus offer a new kind of bewilderment to both politician and newsman. The politician (like F.D.R. in our example, or any holder of a press conference) himself in a sense composes the story; the journalist (like the wire service reporter we have quoted, or any newsman who incites an inflammatory statement) himself generates the event. The citizen can hardly be expected to assess the reality when the participants themselves are so often unsure who is doing the deed and who is making the report of it. Who is the history, and who is the historian?
An admirable example of this new intertwinement of subject and object, of the history and the historian, of the actor and the reporter, is the so-called news “leak.” By now the leak has become an important and well-established institution in American politics. It is, in fact, one of the main vehicles for communicating important information from officials to the public.
A clue to the new unreality of the citizen’s world is the perverse new meaning now given to the word “leak.” To leak, according to the dictionary, is to “let a fluid substance out or in accidentally: as, the ship leaks.” But nowadays a news leak is one of the most elaborately planned ways of emitting information. It is, of course, a way in which a government official, with some clearly defined purpose (a leak, even more than a direct announcement, is apt to have some definite devious purpose behind it) makes an announcement, asks a question, or puts a suggestion. It might more accurately be called a “
sub rosa
announcement,” an “indirect
statement,” or “cloaked news.”
The news leak is a pseudo-event par excellence. In its origin and growth, the leak illustrates another axiom of the world of pseudo-events: pseudo-events produce more pseudo-events. I will say more on this later.
With the elaboration of news-gathering facilities in Washington—of regular, planned press conferences, of prepared statements for future release, and of countless other practices—the news protocol has hardened. Both government officials and reporters have felt the need for more flexible and more ambiguous modes of communication between them. The Presidential press conference itself actually began as a kind of leak. President Theodore Roosevelt for some time allowed Lincoln Steffens to interview him as he was being shaved. Other Presidents gave favored correspondents an interview from time to time or dropped hints to friendly journalists. Similarly, the present institution of the news leak began in the irregular practice of a government official’s helping a particular correspondent by confidentially giving him information not yet generally released. But today the leak is almost as well organized and as rigidly ruled by protocol as a formal press conference. Being fuller of ambiguity, with a welcome atmosphere of confidence and intrigue, it is more appealing to all concerned. The institutionalized leak puts a greater burden of contrivance and pretense on both government officials and reporters.
