The Weekly Screed (#928)

What’s news, pussycat?

by David Benjamin

“I think [the protesters] have succeeded in spoiling the show. The media will be split between covering the parade in Beijing and covering what’s happening in Hong Kong.”

— Pierre Cabestan, political science professor, Hong Kong Baptist University

MADISON, Wis. — Professor Cabestan, bless his heart, is wrong. 

There is no news in a parade. There’s no reason for any medium to cover it. The biggest news ever milked from a parade was when the Underdog balloon deflated and crashed on Thanksgiving in New York (or was that just an episode of “Friends”?).

I make this point because people — even seasoned poli-sci profs — have trouble determining what’s news and what isn’t. Proof of this quandary lies in the fact that millions of seemingly sentient adults treat Facebook as their primary source of “news.” 

Since I started, around age nine, reading my grandparents’ Milwaukee Sentinel, I’ve come to a fairly solid grasp of what constitutes “news,” and to the realization that it’s an idea hard to define. A sense of the news has as much to do with feel as with cerebration. 

Prof. Cabestan’s reference was to dictator Xi Jinping’s big procession of tanks, missiles and goose-stepping troops that hailed the 70th anniversary of Communist Party rule in China. This spectacle wasn’t news because there was nothing different in this parade (except maybe it was a little bigger) from all the previous military parades in all the dictatorships in all the world since God knows how long ago. “News” requires that something different happen. News is a record of the unusual and unexpected, the alarming and remarkable. 

Technically, Xi’s parade in Beijing was what historian Daniel Boorstin, in his book The Image, called a “pseudo-event.” A pseudo-event is a spectacle, staged and scheduled with the expressed intention of getting attention. Boorstin’s definition, in part, requires that a pseudo-event is “not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted and incited it… It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported… Its success is measured by how widely it is reported… The question, ‘Is it real?’ is less important than, ‘Is it newsworthy?’…”

By this measure, both “shows” cited by Prof. Cabestan are pseudo-events, but there is an important distinction. Xi’s parade is a massive top-down propaganda exercise, choreographed to the tiniest detail, denied even the inkling of any surprise and presented to an essentially captive audience. The Hong Kong protests, although tacitly supported by some of the territory’s rich and powerful, are grass-roots pseudo-events loosely planned, largely leaderless and impossible to manage, hence producing a regular flow of surprises. The latest of these was the shooting by police this week of a demonstrator. The shooting was predictable but unplanned and spontaneous. This made it news.

I learned a little about what’s news and what isn’t in one of my first assignments as a stringer for the Rockford(Ill.) Morning Star. I got orders from my editor to cover a murder that had taken place in Beloit, Wis. I hurried to the working-class neighborhood where the crime had happened the night before, but found that the bar had been closed by the police.

No story here. No news. Not even a damn pseudo-event. But I had an assignment. So I found the nearest bar — this part of town had plenty — and commenced to interview several of the patrons, hoping that someone might have known the victim, or the murderer. None did. But in the course of my “coverage,” I developed descriptions of the area, the interior of my alternative tavern and thumbnails of the barflies from whom I extracted quotes.

There was still no news, but what I was doing was “writing the scene,” depicting the atmosphere and aftermath of a real event in an effort to evoke the murder’s causes and its impact. I was like a dilatory vulture, tearing the last shreds of flesh from the bones of a carcass. But my editor loved it. He had thousands of readers who lived in neighborhoods like this, drank in similar joints and knew guys and gals like the drinkers and drunks I had interviewed.

The story worked but it wasn’t news. And I knew this. It was just writing. 

Since then, I’ve filed thousands of stories. A lot were real news — train wrecks, house fires and bar fights, the layoff of hundreds of workers at a local factory, police corruption, a political purge, a family killed on the highway. 

I’ve also reported stories that were partly real and partly pseudo — basketball games, city council and school board battles, the odd murder trial.

Like any journalist, I’ve also trudged dutifully through a vast array of pseudo-events, from high school commencements and ribbon-cuttings to trade shows,  “keynote speeches” and — briefly, long ago — John Lindsay’s presidential campaign.

Trough all this news-gathering (and scene-writing), I’ve often heard the complaint that “there isn’t any good news!” Why can’t journalists find any happy stuff to report.

The glib answer, of course, is that the good, happy stuff is the product of normalcy. Kids growing up, getting good grades, falling in love, getting married, finding a good job that never goes away, having kids, watching them grow up and get good grades. All normal and happy, all of it “good,” none of it news.

One of the earmarks of a pseudo-event is its pretense of “good news.” A pseudo-event is devised, contrived and scripted to bestow upon itself a positive glow. A pseudo-event is always well-lit. It resounds with superlatives and often comes with piped-in music — better yet, a live band. 

Boorstin wrote: “Pseudo-events cost money to create; hence somebody has an interest in disseminating, magnifying, advertising and extolling them as events worth watching or worth believing.”

William Goldman, one of my writing heroes, once identified America’s three great annual pseudo-events (although he did not use Boorstin’s term) as the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards and the (now superannuated and politically incorrect) Miss America pageant. Each, is (or was) overproduced, obscenely expensive, stridently glamorous, deafeningly loud, relentlessly tasteless and “happy” in a laborious sort of way. The “news” these extravaganzas generate, such as it is, is trivial and — to coin an oxymoron — profoundly ephemeral. We all forget the Super Bowl winner in a month, the Oscar winners in a week and Miss America the next morning.

Real news lasts. Pearl Harbor… “Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”… Dallas, 22 November 1963… Watergate…  9/11… Sandy Hook… Katrina. News, simply, is real stuff we don’t expect, and, even if we do anticipate it — like wildfires in a drought or a reality show buffoon becoming president — it doesn’t follow any pattern we might recognize. It’s an unpleasant surprise, a scene you can’t write ahead of time or — quite often — can’t figure out ’til a long time later. 

Once upon a time, it was delivered by professionals who got paid for knowing the difference between news and publicity, and it was explained to us by thinkers who could, well… think. 

And once upon a time, Miss America was a big deal.