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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 40

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
more commonly fictitious than factitious; (c) Its relation to the
underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous; (d) Usually it is
intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(1962, p. 11)

The phenomenon of the pseudo-event was directly associated with the rise
of the mass media in the nineteenth century and their growing need to fill
space (and later, broadcasting airtime). The media’s demand for events to
make into news was matched by the politicians’ need to be reported, a
mutual interdependence which still exists and which will be considered in
greater detail in Chapter 4. Here we note that it created a new species of
event, ‘created’ by the politician, with the connivance of the journalist, which
provided the latter with material and the former with coverage. The public,
however, were not necessarily provided with anything of significance or
value in helping them to formulate political choices (bearing in mind that this
is one of the key functions of the media in liberal democracies).
Typical pseudo-events, in Boorstin’s view, were interviews with politicians
(the first with a US public figure was conducted by a newspaper in 1859);
news releases (the first recorded example being in 1907); party rallies; press
conferences; and ‘leaks’ – most of which, if not all, were of little value as
rational political discourse.
The increasing prevalence of pseudo-events which he detected in the mass
media of the 1960s was not, Boorstin believed, good for democracy,
although probably inevitable in the electronic age.
Although Boorstin does not use the term, this is clearly recognisable as a
‘post-modernist’ view of the world, and the political process, in which the
rise of advertising and public relations in politics ‘express[es] a world where
the image, more interesting than the original, has itself become the original.
The shadow has become the substance’ (ibid., p. 204).
Chapter 2 noted Norberto Bobbio’s criticism that liberal democracy has
failed to encourage a sufficiently educated citizenry, resulting in political
apathy amongst the public. For Jean Baudrillard, the proliferation of empty
spectacle and image in contemporary political discourse is itself a cause of the
phenomenon of ‘the silent majority’ (1983). Through increased exposure to
political marketing techniques, citizens have become consumers of politics,
but not active producers of it. The political pseudo-event has become a
‘hyperreality’, leading to ‘the forced silence of the masses’ (1988, p. 208).
The intrinsic pessimism of this perspective is rejected by others, often
those with interests in the political marketing industries, who view it as elitist
and patronising. Political communication consultants, note Denton and
Woodward,

believe that they are actually making the electoral process more
democratic. They claim that they cannot control votes as the old

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