Archive for Month: September 2016

According to recent polls, American voters are still greatly concerned about the email “scandal,” which has played such a key role in Clinton’s low ratings for “honesty.” This concern is misplaced, as the Congressional Hearings that followed FBI director James Comey’s public announcement of the results of their investigation clearly proved that Clinton never lied about her handling of classified emails.

Lately, I've been writing frequently about how the media generates what Daniel Boorstin, back in the sixties, called the “pseudo-event.” What is a pseudo-event? As I wrote in a recent blog, a pseudo-event is something that acquires its reality not because it is accurate, but because the media has reported it, repeated it, exaggerated it, re-played it, made an indelible mantra of it. In the process, like a piece of trashy gossip that has made the rounds of the high school cafeteria, the pseudo-event becomes stamped in viewers' or readers' mind as true.