Page 65 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

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, as already noted,
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 inter-
dependence 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 recog-
nisable 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 democ-
racy 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).

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