In this edition of Thinking Aloud, I’m riffing on Daniel Boorstin’s classic book from the 1960s, The Image which is about synthetic experiences packaged together as newsworthy items to satisfy consumer demands for novelty and titillation. Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-events” to describe this prepackaged news that is not propaganda per se but is still somewhat dubious. In Boorstin’s words, this form of news is “ambiguous” as regards truth, both for the producers and the consumers. But before I jump in, I have several recent publications I’d like to highlight.
1): Along with two of my colleagues in the MPP program, I wrote an article for Market Urbanism Report titled, Mixed-Use Zoning Doesn’t Lower Housing Costs. What Does? This article came out of a project we worked on together last semester, and it was such a joy to see this article come to fruition.
2): For Breaking Ground, I wrote an extensive essay on police reform. In Part 1 of the essay, I sketch out two ways of considering the purpose of policing, either as a means of catching lawbreakers or as a means of upholding communal norms. I argue that the latter is the better framework, recognizing policing as something done for a community rather than to it. In Part 2, I outline concrete policy proposals for police reform, noting which level of government and how likely the policy is to garner widespread support.
3): Writing for Strong Towns, I reviewed The Innovation Delusion and talked about the vital role of maintenance and repair in the context of a society focused on disruption, innovation, and change.
4): In the New Urbanism section of The American Conservative, I have an article titled The City Planner’s Guide To Tragedies And Trade-Offs in which I review Shane Phillps’ book The Affordable City and talk about the balancing act between supply, stability, and subsidies in the housing market.
As you can see, I’ve been quite busy in my writing. I have three or four forthcoming pieces ranging from a consideration of industrial policy to race and peacemaking to a consideration of public service. I will of course link to those pieces here as they are published. I am also already knee-deep in my research on disinformation, media, and the like, and indeed this edition of the newsletter reflects some of that work. I’ll continue to write on these themes over the course of the semester, with more extensive engagement starting in a month or so.
Okay, now on to the fun stuff.
Pseudo-Events and Ambiguous Truth
In The Image, Daniel Boorstin describes the following characteristics of the pseudo-event:
It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced…its success is measured by how widely it is reported…the question, ‘is it real,’ is less important than, ‘is it newsworthy?’”
Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity…Did the statement really mean what it said?…”
Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hotel’s thirtieth-anniversary celebration, by saying that the hotel is a distinguished institution, actually makes it one.”
Okay, now let’s bring these characters to life with the following hypothetical:
Imagine the following headline: “Senior Official At Pentagon Says Administration Debating Whether To Place Tougher Sanctions on Iran”
As a generally interested reader, you click to read. The article opens by noting increasing tensions between America and Iran, citing public comments made by both nation’s leaders. Then the article says something like, “in light of these escalating tensions, the Administration is considering implementing tougher sanctions, a senior official told me. This official, who talked to me on the condition of anonymity, read a draft copy of the president’s forthcoming speech at American University where the president is expected to outline an updated foreign policy agenda.
This whole news story is kinda strange, isn’t it? It’s akin to what Boorstin describes as the “morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference.” After all, the whole point of the news story is to preview what the President is expected to say, generating headlines and pundit reactions which will then be updated with yet more headlines and punditry after the President speaks. “President Surprises Foreign Policy Community By Not Announcing Expected Sanctions” and “Senior Officials Privately Concerned About President’s New Sanctions” and the like. In all this, the reporter has a vital role, which Boorstin describes as the “midwife” or even “conceiver” of his news: “by the interview technique he incites a public figure to make statements which will sound like news.” But crucially, in this original story, nothing actually happened. Strictly speaking, there is no news. And yet, this kind of pseudo-event is reported all the time…
That raises a question, who is the “news story” for? On the one hand, it’s for all of us consumers who demand a constant barrage of news. Imagine the newspaper that decided it wouldn’t print anything about sanctions until after the President gave his speech. No worries, we would simply turn to the newspaper that does give us the sanctions pseudo-event story, and that other poor newspaper would lose out on our attention for a whole news cycle. But I imagine that a news story like this might have other audiences in mind as well. For example:
Iranian officials might be super interested in getting a preview of what is (or is not) coming there way. And maybe this preview changes their behavior. And maybe that was the intent of the senior official in the first place, and maybe Iran knows that and think it’s a bluff, but then, maybe it’s not a bluff, and…
Other American senior officials who are at odds with the Administration’s strategy might be interested in getting an advanced look at the argument, so that they can begin creating their counter-arguments.
Humanitarian groups (and other NGOs and nonprofits) might appreciate the heads-up about how their work might be effected by the Administration’s plans
Pundits are of course thrilled to have more material to discuss
The President might be particularly interested in seeing how readers react to this news, and that reaction may or may not have influence on what the President does or does not say in his forthcoming speech.
This is just a brief sketch of the various audiences that might be tuned in to a publication like that. And again, the savvy reporter likely has a good idea of who he wants his target audience to be (beyond just the average consumer). Okay, so here is another question: is the “Senior Official Says” story true?
It could be the case that the story is a blatant falsehood made up by an dishonest journalist. There have certainly been many instances of journalists fabricating sources and stories. So there is a baseline level of ambiguity just related to the truth/lie binary. If the source was on record, we could rest assured that the headline is very likely true, because if it were a lie, that official could easily step forward to say as much. Because the source is anonymous, how could we even tell if it were just invented full cloth or not?
But let’s assume that there really was a source. What does “senior” really mean? The phrase itself is ambiguous: “senior official” sounds important, sounds like someone who would really know something. But, what if this “senior official” is just a low-level bureaucrat in the Pentagon who has either inflated his importance to the reporter or who the reporter is willing to inflate in importance for the purposes of a juicy story?
But let’s assume that the senior official really is an important figure. Is the draft of the speech actually representative of where the Administration is heading, or was this perhaps the first draft based on guesses for what the speechwriters expect that the President is likely to say, given what they know about the President? Notice that the article is pretty ambiguous about “the draft” that was seen, and besides, how would the report know? And again, the only way the senior official would know the answer to this is if the senior official is actually really senior.
But let’s assume that the senior official is really senior, that the draft really is a good indication of where the Administration is at. There are still some additional ambiguities. Is this an intentional leak, at the bequest of the Administration, to test out popular reaction? Or is the Administration fuming that this was leaked? (Future pseudo-event headlines might help us: “President Reportedly Furious At Leak…”) If the leak was coordinated, does that make the story untrue, or less true? There is ambiguity here too.
To summarize, in this one news story, we are left wondering, is it an outright falsehood, and if not, is it a planned leak, and if not, is it indicative of the administration’s actual position, and if not is it at least indicative of where the administration was until recently, and if not, is the senior official trying to push the administration in a certain direction, and if so, what is the motive…
Boorstin’s concern (and again, he was writing this in the 60s!!) is that when news media increasingly devotes itself to pseudo-events, our collective ability to understand reality diminishes. We have all lost the plot, as it were. Both those caught in up the production of news and those of us who consume the news are left with layers and layers of ambiguity which obscures our efforts to know what is really true.
I don’t really have any solutions I wish to offer to this problem. But I do want to underscore that I think this is the root behind the use of the phrase “fake news.” Fake is probably not the best word here, because the whole point is that this isn’t propaganda, which is simple to classify as disinformation and lies. It is precisely the ambiguity that makes this so challenging. We feel like we are continually being duped, but there is no one group who is duping us, and in fact, the producers of the news are as duped as we are. We are duped by the very structures and machinery we use to try to understand the world. That’s a kind of existential ambiguity that is especially difficult to live with, and it undermines the epistemic project of explaining the world through media.
But if my argument is compelling here, the takeaway is that we need to depersonalize the issue. The core issue is not sneaky liberals trying to indoctrinate or stupid conservatives rejecting facts: the core issue is an ambiguity that has pervaded our media ecosystem and complicated even the best efforts to understand what is outside our direct experience. I think if we can start to see this as an existential issue facing all of us, we can begin to chart out ideas for how best to address this.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere
The Atlantic reports some good news regarding covid: “Since early January, COVID-19 cases have fallen 57 percent, from the country’s all-time peak, and hospitalizations are down 42 percent.”
Senator Romney’s child allowance policy has sparked a civil war in conservative circles, with some calling it a much-needed policy to support American families while others decry it as a form of welfare that can discourage women from entering the workforce. As you might imagine, I am firmly on the “give families money” side of the argument. Rather than making my own case for it, I’ll just link to the Niskanen Center’s excellent report, The Conservative Case for a Child Allowance
Two of my colleagues at Brookings Metro have a new piece looking at essential workers amidst the pandemic: “Essential workers comprised approximately half (47%) of all workers in occupations with a median wage of less than $15 an hour…”
In the New Republic, Seth Simon has a harrowing essay on how embedded the alt-right is in the comedy scene.
Writing for Strong Towns, urban planner John Myers makes a compelling argument for hyperlocal zoning organized at the street and block level. I think this kind of model has promise in pushing back against NIMBY zoning boards that arbitrarily decide when and where development can occur.
I think L. M. Sacasas is easily one of the best theorists of digital media writing today. In a recent piece titled The Hermeneutical Imperative, Sacasas considers the ways that a digital world forces us to actively interpret what we are experiencing far more than the level of interpretation required to stroll through a park. The argument, put simply, is as follows: “To the degree that our experience is mediated by digital devices, it takes on the quality of a walk through a (very weird) museum full of works of human artifice calling forth our interpretations."