Michael Lissack community, and about the actions of responsible officials to cope. Thus, of- ficials in search of publicity and journalists in search of news don't converge on just any sort of news event. They enact, select, and narrate events in the image of the genre's overarching drama of urgent public danger. Some years back Daniel Boorstin wrote a satirical study of contempo- rary American life in which he talked about pseudoevents. According to Boorstin a pseudoevent is a happening that (1) is not spontaneous but comes about because someone planned planted incited it; (2) is planted primarily for the purpose of being reported or reproduced; (3) has an ambiguous relation to the underlying reality of the subject so that press and public may speculate freely about what it really means: and (4) is usually intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy - e. g. the restaurant mentioned as popular in some fabricated item in a gossip column actually becomes popular. Typical pseu- doevents are the press release the interview and the celebration designed to call attention to a person or a business enterprise. It is worth noting that the two critical elements to the founding of fascism were pseudoevents - Mussolini's march on Rome and Hitler's burning of the Reichstag, both of which led to the leader being named to a formal position of power and both of which had no reality other than being staged. Of course some pseudo- events, perhaps the sounding of trumpets by Joshua for example, serve as deflection for the actual event really taking place (might that trumpet blast have been a signal to start fires to destroy tunnels under Jericho's walls?). Turn on the television pick up a newspaper and the construction of real- ity is going on right there before your eyes. And if you look closely especially if you look closely at the way a given event is interpreted in several different media you cannot fail to notice that many different realities are being con- structed. The general rule is: the larger the audience the simpler the story. Thus, everyone who takes his information about the events of the time from social media of communications - anything from the satellite news to gossip over the back fence gets fiction. Forget about the objective reporter who only gives the facts. Some of those fictions are produced by people who have gone to immense trouble to get close to the raw material out of which their stories are created; have made every effort to understand the circumstances
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