News Critics (Block-I)

Unit 2

Unit 2

Daniel Boorstin: News or Image ?

Structure
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Objectives
2.2 Daniel Boorstin
2.3 The Image
2.4 An Early Theorist of Simulation
2.5 Theory of Simulation
2.6 Examples of simulation
2.7 Consequences of Simulated Environments
2.8 News and Pseudo-Events
2.9 Summary
2.10 Self Test
2.11 Multiple Choice Questions

2.0 Introduction
This unit throws light on the views of philosopher, Daniel Boorstin on the
concept of news.

2.1 Objectives
After studying this unit, the student will be able to understand the concept
and definition of news according Daniel Boorstin.

2.2 Daniel Boorstin

It was said that America's collective IQ took a nosedive on February 28,
2004, when Daniel Joseph Boorstin, historian, professor, writer and
librarian, died of pneumonia at the age of 89. Although Boorstin was well
known as a former Librarian of Congress he was a prolific author who wrote
two best-selling trilogies. His major work, The Americans, in three volumes:
The Colonial Experience (1958), The National Experience (1965), and The
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Democratic Experience (1973) brought him considerable fame. His analysis

of American history and culture's distinctive characteristics earned him the
Pulitzer Prize. Fame and recognition never seemed to have eluded this
genius right from the time he received his B.A. from Harvard University in
1934. More remarkable was his age when he joined Harvard. He was 15.
Boorstin followed it up with two law degrees from the University of Oxford in
1936 and in 1937 as a Rhodes scholar.

Daniel Boorstin
From 1944 to 1969, Boorstin taught history at the University of Chicago.
During this time he wrote The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), The
Genius of American Politics (1953), and the first two volumes of The
Americans, a trilogy. These books, along with Boorstins other works, are
renowned for their depth, erudition, wit, and clarity. Together, the body of his
work gives the reader an unexpected insight on everyday life, our place in it,
and on the unforeseen importance of technology that surrounds us.
Born in Atlanta in 1914, and brought up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Boorstin was
recognized as out of the ordinary very early. After Harvard, when he went to
Oxford to study law. He earned the rare distinction of being called to the
English bar as an American. Boorstin returned to Harvard as a lecturer in
legal history, and published his first book in 1941, The Mysterious Science
of the Law.
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By then, his interests were shifting from law to history. In 1944, he began a
25-year stint as a member of the history faculty at the University of Chicago.
In retrospect, even this was remarkable because he was not formally trained
in history.
It was at Chicago that Boorstin's work focused mainly on early American
history, and wrote the trilogy on America. He pursued the thesis that
America's political life was so peculiar and successful not because of its
theories of government, but because the unique circumstances of American
history and geography. These made America inhospitable to abstract
philosophy, a nation of pragmatists rather than ideologues, and yet a nation
that understands its pragmatism as a theory.

2.3 The Image

Boorstin's boldest and most groundbreaking work, however, is not his
history of early America but a piercing analysis of self-delusion. The Image,
published in 1961, was a path breaking effort to reveal the ways in which
new technologies, combined with a traditional craving for novelty and
penchant for fantastical salesmanship, were increasingly distancing life from
reality. In the book, Boorstin introduced the term "pseudo-event" to describe
events, such as a press conference or "photo opportunity," that exists purely
for the purpose of being reported. In the same vein, celebrities were persons
who are well-known for their well-knownness." Boorstin sought to show,
through historical narrative and telling anecdotes, what has been lost and
what has been gained as news-making replaces news-gathering, celebrities
replace heroes, tourists replace travelers, and images replace ideals.
Boorstin's comments on the first televised presidential debate, the John F.
Kennedy-Richard Nixon debate, held the year before The Image was
published also came in for his harsh treatment: "The drama of the situation
was mostly specious, or at least had an extremely ambiguous relevance to
the main (but forgotten) issue: which participant was better qualified for the
presidency. Of course, a man's ability, while standing under lights, without
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notes, to answer in two-and-a-half minutes a question kept secret until that

moment, had only the most dubious relevance if any at all to his real
qualifications to make deliberate presidential decisions on long-standing
public questions after being instructed by a corps of experts. The greatest
presidents in our history (with the possible exception of Roosevelt), Boorstin
said, would have done miserably. But the most notorious demagogues
would have shone in such debates. Pseudo-events thus lead to emphasis
on pseudo-qualification."
The character of television, Boorstin argued, reinforced the love of illusion
amongst audiences, and the results were not always to be welcomed.
Boorstin was always identified with books. He argued that the book was in
fact man's greatest technical innovation, never surpassed. "The computer
can help us find what we know is there," he said in a speech at the dawn of
the age of personal computers, "but the book remains our symbol and our
resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer." Given
his love for books, his nomination by US President Ford to be Librarian of
Congress in 1975 should have been a natural choice. It wasnt. However,
his term at the Library of Congress was noted for its focus on modernizing
and democratising the library's resources, making them available to the
public and not just to members of Congress. Boorstin opened the library's
reading rooms and collections to all, and during his term the library began to
host public events and act as a center of intellectual activity in Washington.
The public use of the Library of Congress more than doubled during his
tenure there and Boorstin continued to write works on American history,
politics, and technological change.
For six decades, Boorstin's keen eye and sharp pen were just what America
needed to understand the flow and meaning of its history, and to think about
its future with a mind open to the unexpected. He understood the way
hegemony operated. Many felt the way he did, but no one articulated it until
Boorstin did. He ran an old-fashioned operation: no market research or
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research assistants. Manuscripts were typed on an old Olympia, then duly

handed in to his primary editor, his wife, Ruth, who just as often duly handed
them back and told him to do better.
Boorstin was not universally admired. Although he disliked making political
statements in his writing, he didn't hold back in other settings. In the 1950s,
appearing before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, he named
names of Communist Party members. In the 1960s, he was against
affirmative action and spoke harshly of student radicals.
Professional historians viewed Boorstin with mixed feelings. He wrote
political history, cultural history, creative history and what deserved to be
called popular history. But he was criticized for overlooking the more political
moments of American history, from McCarthyism and Vietnam in the 1950s
and '60s.
He had previously been Director of the National Museum of American
History and Senior Historian of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington,
D.C. Boorstin graduated with highest honors from Harvard College and
received his doctorate from Yale University. As a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol
College, Oxford, he won a coveted "double first" in two degrees of law and
was admitted as a barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, London. He was
also a member of the Massachusetts Bar, a visiting professor at the
University of Rome, the University of Geneva, the University of Kyoto and
the University of Puerto Rico. In Paris he was the first incumbent of a chair
in American History at the Sorbonne. At Cambridge University, England, he
was Pitt Professor and Fellow of Trinity College. Boorstin lectured widely in
the United States and all over the world. One of the few triple winners the
Pulitzer Prize, the Parkman Prize and the Bancroft Prize he received
numerous honorary degrees and decorated by the governments of France,
Belgium, Portugal and Japan. Boorstin was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa's
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Distinguished Service to the Humanities Award and the Charles Frankel

Prize of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1989 he received
the National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American
Letters by the National Book Foundation.
Boorstin wrote about the evolution of clocks, where elevators were first used
and why the Chinese didn't discover America. His books sold millions of
copies and were translated into more than 20 languages.
But his most influential work continues to be The Image. Perhaps because
years before such concerns were common, Boorstin wrote that the
combination of mass media and corporate power had transformed the
"language of ideals" into the "language of images." News had become
dominated by public relations, by "pseudo-events" staged for the sake of
being reported. Our heroes were celebrities, people famous for being
famous, he wrote.

2.4 An Early Theorist of Simulation

Boorstin was perhaps the first social critic writing non-fiction who understood
the way contemporary culture uses simulations and false appearances that
is at the heart of The Image. He also saw that we seek simulations because
we aren't satisfied with what the mundane, non-fiction, world can offer.
But even as society has been developing new and more elaborate
simulations, there have been a growing number of efforts by critics to
understand what has been taking place. Most have the same message:
society, they say, is in danger, from the growing role of illusion in our
material and cultural environment.
It was Boorstin who may have been the first to suggest this idea in a book;
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America recognized that
simulation is a distinct social category, linking together many apparently
disparate phenomena.
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He warned that America was living in an "age of contrivance," in which

illusions and fabrications had become a dominant force in society. Public
life, he said, was filled with "pseudo-events" staged and scripted events
that were a kind of counterfeit version of actual happenings. Just as there
were now counterfeit events, so, he said, there were also counterfeit people
celebrities whose identities were being staged and scripted, to create
illusions that often had no relationship to any underlying reality. Even the
tourism industry, which had once offered adventure seekers a passport to
reality, now insulated travellers from the places they were visiting, and,
instead, provided "artificial products," in which "picturesque natives
fashion(ed) papier-mch images of themselves," for tourists who expected
to see scenes out of the movies.

2.5 Theory of Simulation

As simulation has become a dominant characteristic of contemporary
society, social critics have begun to discuss its effect. And apart from
Boorstin were Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Michael
Sorkin. Many of our invented worlds can be used to enhance fantasy. But
we can also mistake fantasy for reality, and end up playing a role in other
people's fictions.
The two major points of opposition to such a world are to do with:
1. Simulation and the Creation of a Human World:
Science and technology are used to gain power over the world and to
create fictional substitute "worlds" in which we have complete control.
2. Story-Based Simulations: Art and Technology Masquerading as Life:
Contemporary forms of simulation, such as movie rides and environments
of predetermined themes, evolved out of traditional forms of fiction.

2.6 Examples of simulation

Disney's Distorted Mirror: Artificial landscapes manipulate visitors.

Like much of popular culture, Disney promises to let us escape the limits

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of everyday life into a fictional realm of endless happiness in which time

and space no longer constrain us. It lets us do now, in simulated form,
what we hope to eventually be able to do in reality, with technology. But
the promise of freedom and happiness it offers is mere illusion.

Zoos, Artificial Rain Forests and Simulation: Worlds in a Bottle:

How is it possible for invented worlds to be lifelike? Artificial rain forests,
parks and zoos surround us with ready simulations of what is. This is the
best in-depth exploration on the site, of what contemporary culture is about.

Cities of Simulation: Las Vegas: Sin city turns into sun city, as the
American landscape increasingly comes to resemble the landscape of
the imagination.

Advertising and the invention of Postmodernity: An entire lifestyle that

is held out as ideal and desired is put together by product sellers for profit.

2.7 Consequences of Simulated Environments

An entire culture of deception is now in place
We are constantly confusing simulations for what they imitate. We do so by
accident and because a great many people profit by tricking us. Our
governing elites now largely rely on deceptive appearances to maintain their
wealth and power.
Bringing Fantasy to Life
In popular culture, we increasingly move from one kind of virtual reality to
another. Here, instead of reading about characters in stories, we are starting
to become the characters. What we do in these invented worlds is what we
also do vicariously in more traditional forms of fiction we act out the
fantasies, fears and desires that are essential to our personalities, but with a
more exciting setting and plot that enhances the experience. Interactive
films justifying revenge, cyber sex and recreational evil are now made and
distributed. Paradoxically, simulations are also used to help us learn skills
and master situations thereby justifying all simulation.
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The Automated Environment

We are fabricating an environment that is full not only of simulations but also
of intelligent technologies and forms of automation that wait on us and give
us control over our surroundings. Much of the environment of the near future
will be made up of intelligent technologies and illusion.
In sum, the society of the future is likely to have the following features:
1. They will use technology to overcome the limits of the world;
2. They use simulations and virtual realities as substitutes for what they
can't yet get from the world directly;
3. They will hold to an ideology that says the acting out of fantasy is a form
of art, entertainment and liberation;
4. They view physical reality; society and mind as forms of illusion or as
something much like illusion.

2.8 News and Pseudo-Events

Rooted in the above world of simulation is Boorstins definition of a pseudoevent as a happening with the following characteristics:
1. 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.
2. It is planned and planted for the immediate purpose of being reported and
reproduced. So its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of being
reported. Its success is measured in terms of how widely it is reported.
3. Its relation to reality is ambiguous
4. Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. An institution
celebrating its 50th anniversary makes the institution important
Expectedly, Boorstin's criticism came from the political right. It is in a long
tradition of works that warn against the vulgarization of high culture by mass
society. In the age of contrivance, ideals are replaced by superficial images.
When Boorstin published The Image in 1961, it was more a response to the
emergence of these trends in America. But it is so true of societies elsewhere
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including Indian. Boorstin saw what was taking place with a remarkable clarity
and his criticism of the packaging of politicians, politics and celebrities, is by
now one of the most significant truths of all developing societies.

2.9 Summary
Daniel Boorstin was highly critical of news and termed it as a pseudo-event
which provides an escape route for illusion amongst the audiences.

2.10 Self Test

1. Give a brief introduction of Daniel Boorstin.
2. Briefly explain the theory of simulation.
3. What are the consequences of simulated environment?

2.11 Multiple Choice Questions

1) Daniel Boorstin was a teacher of _________ subject at the University of
Chicago.
a) Philosophy
b) Political Science
c) History
d) None of the above
2) Daniel Boorstin introduced the term _________ to describe events that
exists purely for the purpose of being reported.
a) pseudo-event
b) news event
c) pseudo-qualification
d) None of the above
3) Which city did Daniel Boorstin term as a Sin City?
a) Las Vegas
b) Los Angeles
c) New York
d) Texas
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