Why nothing seems real

Why does the term “fake news” have so much grasp over our political discourse, since Hillary Clinton first uttered it on Dec. 8, 2016, in a reference to “the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year” only to have the coinage jiujitsued on her by Donald Trump? Why has more than one person suggested to me that for Generation Z, looking good in your Instagram profile is more important than looking good in the flesh? Why must television newscasters repeat the same pointless nonstory for the third time this hour with the label “BREAKING,” which sits there virtually permanently?

The answer to all this is in a book that came out six decades ago this month, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin. Since it is about “the menace of unreality,” the book is at least as important on its 60th anniversary as it was at the moment of its release. Its simple answer is this: Everything feels fake because, in part, it is. More specifically, everything feels fake because since the invention of the photograph and many technologies that followed from roughly the same time period, the reproduction and dissemination of words and images has become so technologically cheap and easy that ideas, too, have become cheap. Everything is now a copy, often a copy of a copy.

Boorstin superseded and drew on Walter Lippmann, the master and in many ways founder of modern media studies who in 1922 created the term “stereotyping.” A stereotype was “a distorted picture or image in a person’s mind, not based on personal experience, but derived culturally.” Like many evocative terms, it is a metaphor. Stereotyping is really a printing technique whereby movable raised letter blocks are set on a mold of a page called a chase and then paper can be pressed onto it with ink to produce a page of, usually, a newspaper. Perhaps it is not surprising that the core term for how bigotry works in the mind comes from the logistics of the production of journalism.

Boorstin takes Lippman’s insight and applies it to his age, a time when John F. Kennedy had just won an election by looking handsome and chic on television, when the men Don Draper is based on had started selling Lucky Strikes by noting that “It’s Toasted,” omitting that all other brands’ cigarette tobacco is too, and when jet travel to air-conditioned hotels had made it possible for Americans to go abroad and have a tourist experience offering little actual exposure to the local environment.

But much more than the superficial or material conditions of fakeness, thinking in cheaply reproduced ideas becomes a habit for a culture. As such, people responsible for disseminating words and images (that is, “media”) and us (media consumers) have created a never-ending feedback loop in which we demand more fakeness and are provided it. The process trains us to accept what Boorstin calls “pseudo-events” as legitimate subjects for coverage.

A pseudo-event is anything that takes place just to be reported on. It is a news event that is contrived for the purpose of being a news event. The ur-case would be a press conference of any size from a grand reopening of a department store to a presidential address, a choreographed event that exists only for the purpose of the coverage it receives. Or that was the ur-case when this book was released. Today it would be when someone puts on an outfit and goes out somewhere just so he can photograph himself doing it and post it — anything done “for the gram.” According to New York magazine, “a Moscow-based photography studio is now renting out grounded private jets to aspiring Instagram stars who just can’t quite come up with the funds to charter a flying one.”

The process that occurs when we “mix up our roles as actor and audience,” which we now call postmodernity, applies to more than just the development of journalism Boorstin spends the first chapter describing. A celebrity, Boorstin explains in a later chapter, “is a person who is known for his well-knownness. … He is the human pseudo-event.” Boorstin’s references are to his own era when he explains how entertainers are “best qualified to become celebrities because they are skilled in the marginal differentiation of their personalities. … They do this by minutiae of grimace, gesture, language, and voice.”

The Oxford English Dictionary added both “pseudo-event” and “well-knownness” by 1987. Along with the news and the celebrity culture the news increasingly concerns itself with, later chapters cover the pseudo-event’s place in the worlds of travel, art, literature and book publication, and finally even international relations and national self-understanding. We may now be so deep into the hole of a world organized centrally around the needs of PR that it is not shocking or outrageous to know that people in the public eye work to shape coverage in how they behave. But for the news media, the shift from passive to active interaction, the move “from newsgathering to newsmaking” Boorstin covers since Colonial America, has wrought fundamental changes in the way we experience the world around us and recently. The term “news release” dates only to 1907.

What makes The Image more than just the origin of a catchy phrase plus a useful observation is in the detail with which it explains not just that many events in our world are contrived specifically to serve public relations purposes, but the actual process by which pseudo-events beget other pseudo-events, and thus slowly take over everything, rendering all the world a soundstage.

The most vivid of many examples is the story of the Lindbergh baby. The reason for this story’s status is that it was a moment when the pseudo-event became self-aware, when the forces of celebrity and public relations and yellow journalism combined and multiplied by one another. Boorstin chronicles how as the story of the aviator’s child’s kidnapping became central to everyday news publishing without there being enough actual news to fill the column inches, “a large proportion of the news soon consisted of stories of how Lindbergh reacted to the ‘news’ and to the publicity about himself. People focused their admiration on how admirably Lindbergh responded to publicity, how gracefully he accepted his role of celebrity. … This was the tautology of celebrity.” Second-order pseudo-events. By this level of attention, our heroes are “evaporated” into mere celebrities, as per the Carlyle quote “no man can be a hero to his Valet” — or, Boorstin jokes, “to his Time reporter.”

Then there is the cheapening of real organs of publishing, such as magazines and the book world. A striking episode in The Image discusses how Reader’s Digest came to be and how it contrived to remake much of the magazine publishing world. Starting with just a two-person staff, Reader’s Digest would publish clippings of longer pieces in other magazines by way of both summary and recommendation. The other magazines accepted the theft because it served their publicity. But not long after its creation, Reader’s Digest was not only the most highly subscribed magazine in the country, having associated itself with a brand of knowingness and briskness of character that readers would want to associate with their own image, but it was also manipulating the print media to serve its own needs. Reader’s Digest editors would conceive, commission, fund, and plant an article in some other magazine, in order that it could be excerpted and digested in their own. Some 60% of articles in Reader’s Digest were really examples of this “literary pseudo-event” — articles that were “made to appear … in order that it might afterwards be reported in the Digest.”

As for books, the age of PR has created all kinds of pseudo-books. As “the motion picture industry became the trade publisher’s largest customer,” it became expected that the average consumer would get to see any truly big hit novel as a screen adaptation eventually. Film technology had made it the case that the human imagination at work on a piece of written fiction was not the most vivid way to see into some other mind’s imaginary world. Of course, the movie was a copy of a copy, but it was an expectation now, so books started to be produced just because of their ability to adapt into films. This, Boorstin suggests, is why the great novelists from a hundred years ago or so turned to modernist stream-of-consciousness-style writing, as James Joyce did. The interior world of the mind was the only thing they still had the best ability to lucidly relate. A more troubling pseudo-event in the world of books is the “bestseller,” which “was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.” Celebrities and bestselling books after all exist for the same reason: We crave shared experience, and marketers know it.

What of fine visual art and music? Neither, of course, is safe from the same process of fakening. Boorstin tells the story of the Muzak corporation, which is now a byword for music that feels contrived. In the ’40s and ’50s, the company piped music around the country, and “music by Muzak was being heard by about fifty million Americans daily.” But to keep it flowing into public spaces required choosing music that, as an executive of Muzak put it, was “basically music to hear, not to listen to.” Selling music subscriptions meant making music with no soul. I need not even explicitly draw the line between this and the age of Spotify and the consolidating tyranny of the algorithm.

With painting, “formerly a competent copy (say of a Giotto by a member of his school) has an authentic and dignified originality all its own. Now, when mechanical reproductions offer items precisely like the original, the uniqueness both of originals and copies is dissolved.”

Finally, and crucially, Boorstin gets to Madison Avenue. It is commonly understood that advertisers, with ever-more sly tools from psychology and market research, are masters of reality manipulation. And they are, but only because they push on open doors. As Boorstin points out in a discussion of beloved huckster P.T. Barnum, “contrary to popular belief, Barnum’s great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived.”

The Image is a masterpiece of media studies because it transcends cliches and makes you think much harder about what is really happening in our culture than simply blaming things on manipulation and moving on. Being a conservative, Boorstin is able to see the spread of fakeness as a demand-side problem, not a supply-side one that some Elizabeth Warren could so simply trustbust and regulate away. The fault lies not in our Hollywood stars but in ourselves. “Our problem is harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs. It is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events — in all kinds of packages, in black-and-white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms — is the world of the whole machinery of our society.”

Media criticism today is the subject of an insane double standard, what we might call “Schroedinger’s Media Matters.” In the prevailing discourse, it is commonly understood or even assumed that the mass media in the form of advertisers, corporations, book publishing, and most importantly TV and print and online journalism can create public narratives with profound practical consequences. Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky’s book co-written with Khmer Rouge denier Edward S. Herman, remains a classic. And magazines from the New Republic and the Atlantic as well as newspapers such as the New York Times are often blamed, sometimes by themselves, for the conditions under which 48 Republican and 29 Democratic senators voted to authorize war in Iraq. It is understood widely and regardless of political affiliation why dictators snuff out independent media when they rise to power and that elections are only nominally “free” if they take place with valid vote-counting yet in a controlled media environment. We all know the literary reason why George Orwell has Winston Smith work as a press censor in 1984.

At the same time, it is considered obvious that the right-wing media’s obsession with media criticism exposes the Right as obsessed with an embarrassing irrelevancy. Well, which is it? Journalists wield remarkable power, which is why people with so many social and financial resources fight bitterly to go into journalism.

One theme subtly runs through Boorstin’s work, including The Image, and that is American exceptionalism. Boorstin was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of one of the lawyers who had defended Leo Frank, a Jewish factory worker falsely accused of rape and later lynched in Georgia in a case often called the “American Dreyfus Affair,” which gripped and was worsened by the national press. Boorstin went to Harvard and Oxford, where he was a college-aged commie, later reformed, and he was investigated by McCarthy, to whom he snitched. He spent the rest of his life, including after he was appointed the librarian of Congress under Ford, Carter, and Reagan, writing some 20 history books looking subtly at American culture, obsessed with the idea that because America is based on creed rather than tradition, it can be anything, which is both a profound danger and an enormous opportunity. He wanted America to understand the gravity of its uniqueness. In The Image, Boorstin points out that one thing that is not a copy of anything is his country, a perfect original.

In his final plaint to try to get people to see through mere images and capture a sense of actual ideals, Boorstin writes of how modern Americans have an individual responsibility to practice a very deep sort of media literacy so that we can untangle the problem postmodernity presents, so we can connect with the actual and the beautiful. “One of our grand illusions,” he writes in closing, “is a belief in a ‘cure.’ There is no cure. There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning.”

One way to make it much more likely you seize the glamorous and enlightening opportunity of America is to read The Image, a breathtakingly incisive book that, over 60 years, has earned its well-knownness.

Nicholas Clairmont is the life and arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.