Modern politics requires us to spend a lot of time in a very strange place. It’s a kind of theater where intense little dramas are constantly being performed. The presidential candidates are the actors. The plays are written and produced by media people—journalists, bloggers, and other shapers of information.
Everything happens quickly on this stage, and the scenery changes all the time. One moment we’re in Bosnia watching a welcome ceremony—and watching it, and watching it (these shows employ repetition for effect). Next we’re somewhere in Pennsylvania, where the drama “Bittergate” is unfolding. And so on.
The plays are all “real,” in that they are based on actual events. But in the hands of the producers, real quickly becomes unreal, and facts fade into insignificance. In the end, what happened matters less than our feelings about what happened, and how the actors “handled” their assigned roles.
Welcome to the Pseudo-Sphere, a term coined a few years ago by reporter and blogger Garance Franke-Ruta, now with The Washington Post. It refers to the synthetic, manufactured nature of a certain kind of mega-story that has been dominating the campaign coverage. The phrase echoes both “pseudo-environment,” Walter Lippmann’s term for the world of mediated information, and the “pseudo-events” that Daniel Boorstin famously defined back in 1961. According to Boorstin, a pseudo-event has the following qualities:
1. It is not spontaneous but planned, planted, or incited. “Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake but an interview.”
2. Its purpose is to be reported as news, and its success is measured not by the inherent value of the information but by how widely it travels. “The question ‘Is it real?’ is less important than ‘Is it newsworthy?’ ”
3. It has an ambiguous relationship with reality. “Did the statement really mean what it said? Without some of this ambiguity, a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.”
4. It is usually a self-fulfilling prophecy. By merely suggesting that X and Y happened, the media effectively cause them to happen.
The last two points are especially relevant to this political moment. When the media culture goes into one of its frenzies over a candidate’s error or embarrassment, there’s a tendency to believe that the incident mattered on its own terms—i.e., that it clearly meant something terribly important.
But the Pseudo-Sphere is not that rational. As Boorstin noted, what makes these stories “interesting” is that their meaning is unclear. Why? Because hard facts are boring, and not very useful if you’re trying to fill news holes and airtime. What the public craves, and the media are happy to provide, is news that is both shocking on its face (he said what?) and endlessly debatable (what did he really mean when he said it?).
Thus, although media types often rue the pig pile that these stories become, they are constantly on patrol for them. Where would cable news and the blogs be without them? In journalism, having a hit in the Pseudo-Sphere is like money. When the chattering class is chattering about your story, that’s as good as it gets.
Political professionals often complain about pseudo-news, but they’d also be lost without it. Strategists and pollsters make their living by tracking, analyzing, and gaming the vicissitudes of the candidates. As on Wall Street, these insiders know how to play both the ups and the downs; the money is in the variations. And the Pseudo-Sphere is all about variation.
That’s why when Candidate A is hit with a negative pseudo-event (Bosnia), something very nearly as unfortunate will almost surely follow for Candidate B (Bittergate). Newton’s third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) is honored in the Pseudo-Sphere. And every action fulfills its own destiny, becoming the “truth” of the moment.
Is there any hope of escaping this madhouse? Alas, no. And it’s not all that mad. As Lippmann observed, reality itself—all the events that actually happen each day—is an awfully big subject, “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.” To make sense of it, he argued, we need a simplified version, which is what the media wind up providing. The question is, does it have to be this simple?
This article appeared in the Saturday, April 19, 2008 edition of National Journal.
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