Michael Lissack bring with them longer term costs and disabilities and count on a fresh round of future media-won benefits to offset the costs when the bill comes due for payment. The politics media stories make possible has its moments. Some prob- lems and issues that lend themselves to headline treatment are inscribed on the public agenda. Officials are forced to exercise leadership. Events build toward a climactic burst of public action in which crises are managed, prob- lems are addressed, scandals are set right, rights are vindicated, malefactors are brought to justice, and the needs of the people are served. In all areas of life we encounter a kind of distancing from the real and the material a derealization. Communication technologies replace direct contact with the environment. The mass media create their own world, a hyperreality where the gap between image and reality is erased because ev- erything is mediated, filtered through commentators, news bureaus, images, standardized analyses, talk shows, and events that are chosen and staged for the occasion. The media coverage of an event becomes the event's sim- ulation, a complicated game that for all parties becomes more real than the reality itself. We never gain access to the raw reality, because reality itself is spun into the entire information society's web of images, messages, signs, and mediations. Substance disappears. The picture becomes a simulation, a picture without precedent object, model, or ideal -- a picture that meets no requirement for truth, individuality, or utopian hope. In terms of govern- ment what emerges is a pattern of quick to mandate and slow to evaluate, of appeasing public concerns rather than acting on their merits. Programs are set into motion without regard to cost - which often has not been realistically projected. Journalistic bias would be a minor concern if the press's stories were inconsequential. They could be dismissed as interesting diversions in the melodrama of life. But these stories sometimes have substantial effects. When Clinton is claimed to be dead in the water because he is "perceived as too slick," the message works its way into the public's consciousness. The effort to stage persuasive images of crises and emergency responses soon leads people farther and farther afield of reality. Fictional events soon come
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