Page 44 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

actors themselves, pursued through media institutions. In some
cases, journalists will attempt to publicise and expose what is
hidden. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the media often have an interest
in playing the watchdog role over the politicians. On the other
hand, the media may be complicit in the politicians’ concealment
of sensitive information (if, for example, a newspaper is strongly
committed to a government it may choose to ignore an otherwise
newsworthy story).
More generally, there are many aspects of the process of media
production which in themselves make media organisations vulnerable
to strategies of political manipulation.
In 1962 Daniel Boorstin coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ in
response to what he saw as the increasing tendency of news and
journalistic media to cover ‘unreal’, unauthentic ‘happenings’. This
tendency, he argued, was associated with the rise from the
nineteenth century onwards of the popular press and a
correspondingly dramatic increase in the demand for news
material. ‘As the costs of printing and then broadcasting increased,
it became financially necessary to keep the presses always at work
and the TV screen always busy. Pressures towards the making of
pseudo-events became ever stronger. Newsgathering turned into
news making’ (1962, p.14).
An important source of pseudo-events for the media has of course
been the political process—interviews with government leaders, news
leaks and press conferences all provide reportable material which is
happily taken up by the media to fill newspaper column inches and
broadcast airtime. Thus, argues Boorstin, the twentieth century has
seen a relationship of mutual convenience and interdependence evolve
between the politician and the media professional, as one strives to
satisfy the other’s hunger for news while at the same time maximising
his or her favourable public exposure. For Boorstin in 1962, the
trend was not welcome.

In a democratic societ…freedom of speech and of the press
and of broadcasting includes freedom to create pseudo-
events. Competing politicians, newsmen and news media
contest in this creation. They vie with each other in
offering attractive, ‘informative’ accounts and images of
the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring
new facts into being, to demand answers to their own
contrived questions. Our ‘free market of ideas’ is a place
where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events

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