Inside ‘The Situation Room’

In The Image, his landmark 1962 book about how mass media was warping American life, historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event to describe something that exists for the sole purpose of its own publicity. A pseudo-event, he explained, is anything that happens just to garner coverage.

We’re all familiar with the concept of the publicity stunt, of course. But Boorstin’s examination is subtler and wider. He explained how, from the fine arts to foreign travel to celebrity culture to publishing, a self-referential process was taking off that even more than half a century ago was making everything feel unreal, because the things one heard about existed only in order to get one to hear about them.