Soft News and Pseudo Events

"A journalist makes himself the hero of the story. A reporter is only a witness."
--Jim Cleary (Deadline U.S.A.)

Yesterday these pages observed that there has been a lack of reporting and analysis by the mainstream of the actual Charlottesville riots--particularly with respect to First Amendment issues and how that process broke down.

Ryan McMaken provides an interesting follow up piece here. "Already," he notes, "the media has lost interest in analyzing the details of the event itself, and are instead primarily reporting on what Donald Trump, his allies, and his enemies have to say about it."

A good example is this WSJ piece this morning that focuses on what Donald Trump said yesterday during a press conference. The tone implies that Trump is wrong for claiming that both sides--the original assembly and the protesters of that assembly--shared blame for the violence. No reasonable mind should dispute Trump's claim given what facts have been made widely known about the events in Charlottesville, and not one shred of evidence is offered in the article that suggests otherwise.

McMaken links this situation to a phenomenon seen in the national media for many years: a shift away from who/what/when/where factual reporting about an event to a focus on what people who were not directly involved in the event think or say about it. Old school newspaper types would term this as a movement from 'hard' to 'soft' new. Historian Daniel Boorstin calls it an evolution toward 'pseudo events.'

Boorstin suggests that the need to create more copy led reporters and editors to realize that they could 'create' news by focusing on how people respond to a particular narrative that often first requires creation by media types themselves. That response constitutes the pseudo event. It is particularly 'news' when individuals defy the narrative in some way. Trump, of course, is a media dream in this regard.

McMaken suggests that what passes for news coverage today actually involves pseudo event journalism that, when you break it down, involves far more opinion than fact.