Abstract
This article introduces a journalistic intervention into routinized political ‘pseudo-events’ that can lull reporters and citizens into stultified complacency about public affairs while facilitating highly disciplined politicians’ cynical messaging. The intervention draws on non-representational theory, a style of research that aims to disrupt automatic routines and encourage people to recognize possibilities for change from moment to moment. The article details the author’s coverage of a routine political rally from a perspective untethered to normalized journalistic or political cues of importance, to generate affective and possibly unpredictable responses to the content.
On 7 October 2016, the day a video surfaced showing Donald Trump bragging about groping unsuspecting women in a behind-the-scenes moment from a television taping, reporters following vice presidential candidate Mike Pence were ensconced in iconic Toledo restaurant Tony Packo’s, awaiting the key event of the day. The plan for the ‘pool’ reporters, a small group assigned to shadow the candidate and share news with the rest of the press corps, had been to ‘cover Pence’s departure from the restaurant, which would include Pence “looking at Trump’s signed hot-dog bun”’ (Calderone and Baumann, 2016). In an unfortunate turn for journalism history, however, Pence’s staff grew skittish when they noticed reporters ‘had been looking down at [their] phones and chatting’, according to a segment of the pool report published by the Huffington Post: The pool did not address the Trump stories at all, but the staffer then left the pool to head to the back of the restaurant, where Pence and other aides were. Upon returning, the staffer said the pool needed to leave, specifically saying Pence would no longer be going to view the signed bun and, instead, would go directly to his campaign bus. (Calderone and Baumann, 2016)
The Huffington Post story took umbrage at this move, declaring that [r]emoving the press pool is a break with protocol that’s sure to frustrate news organizations, which pay a lot for reporters to follow the candidates each day on the campaign trail. They could potentially miss a newsworthy, even historically significant, moment if denied access to the candidate’s movements. (Calderone and Baumann, 2016)
The story appears to be presented without irony, yet I find it difficult to relate both this event and its alleged implications with a straight face. To suggest that reporters covering a US presidential campaign featuring extraordinary stakes for the nation and the planet had been deprived of a ‘historically significant moment’ through the cancelation of Mike Pence’s plans to look at a piece of fake bread signed by his boss is to encapsulate the frivolity and passivity of American political journalism in an anecdote. It is both amusing and infuriating to contemplate that a number of the country’s most experienced journalists working on one of the most consequential stories in modern history had spent a day sequestered in a restaurant preparing for a 57-year-old man to gawk at a hot-dog bun that he had been scheduled to view for the very purpose of ensuring that those reporters witnessed and disseminated the event.
What is striking about both the pool report snippet and its contextualization in the Huffington Post is how normal and commonsensical these contrived events appear to reporters. It is presented as a matter of course that reporters should tail candidates for national office with the duty of recording their scripted gazes at bakery items, kissing of babies, ladling of soup, and other promotional activities designed solely to entertain these reporters and distribute propaganda to voters. There are different names for such events in the annals of political communication and postmodernism. Daniel Boorstin (1987 [1961]), writing over half a century ago, termed them ‘pseudo-events’. And Jean Baudrillard (1983), two decades later, tagged such hollowed-out occurrences whose signifiers precede their signifieds as ‘simulations’. As scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens across the globe discuss the proliferation of ‘fake news’ (see Ordway, 2017) and its potentially devastating effects on democratic processes, it bears remembering that a good deal of the political news we call ‘normal’ is essentially fake as well.
The purpose of this article is to introduce an intervention into such events that undermines their scriptedness and reasserts journalistic autonomy over the coverage of public affairs by directing attention to details beyond those preordained by politicians. The inspiration for this intervention is a research approach called non-representational theory (NRT), whose emphasis on affect, immanence, and experience allows for more generative and expressive forms of research and communication. I will illustrate the intervention through a brief case study of a political rally that I covered using non-representational principles.
Pseudo-events and simulations
Political actors routinely take advantage of the slippage between phenomena and communication by constructing phenomena that appear spontaneous in their representation while having been carefully scripted and painstakingly performed. This practice is captured in the 20th-century concept of the ‘pseudo-event’ introduced by Boorstin (1987 [1961]: vii), who wrote, ‘I do not know what “reality” is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one’. Boorstin identifies four characteristics of a pseudo-news event: it is (1) planned, not spontaneous; (2) ‘arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media’ (p. 11); (3) ambiguously related to any underlying reality; and (4) ‘intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (p. 12). Boorstin’s example is a flagging hotel that hires a public relations firm to contrive an anniversary event organized by prominent townspeople. The event is planned and covered, it exists only because it was planned to be covered, and it creates prestige by enacting prestige. For our example, we can take Mike Pence and the hot-dog bun. Pence’s viewing was scheduled by his press handlers, strictly for the purpose of being photographed and disseminated in the news. Its connection with campaign issues or the problems vexing Americans was tenuous. And it was designed to create the illusion that Pence was a Trump admirer through the image of Pence admiring a Trump artifact.
Presidential-level pseudo-events are among the most commonly identified by press critics. Boorstin (1987 [1961]) named Franklin Roosevelt as a pioneer of the pseudo-event and the modern press conference. Bennett (2003) recalled Richard Nixon being depicted visiting a pristine California beach after an oil spill in Santa Barbara; the beach was clean because it wasn’t the site of the spill. ‘In other words, the public was shown a real beach but it was not shown the real problem’ (Bennett, 2003: 142). Likewise, Bagdikian (1992) complained about news media acquiescence to banal photo opportunities of Ronald Reagan that represented the president as cheerfully competent without requiring him to account for anything.
The pseudo-event trap is a function of standard news values: good visuals of a prominent, powerful, and popular politician, satisfying the incessant need for breaking news, even if the news is simply the president striding across a tarmac. News workers, under constant pressure to fill space and time, are putty in the hands of clever pseudo-event creators and often do their bidding without regard for the social consequences. As Boorstin (1987 [1961]) wrote of reporters’ relationship with the communist-hunting pseudo-event master Joseph McCarthy, ‘Many hated him; all helped him’ (p. 22). This observation, of course, predates Trump’s perfection of the Twitter-based pseudo-event and the campaign rally structured to require news organizations to accurately report untruths about their own veracity. Boorstin, in the mid-20th century, made a clear distinction between pseudo-events and propaganda – ‘While a pseudo-event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood’ (p. 34) – but in the current ‘postfactual’ era (Bybee, 1999; Godler and Reich, 2017), this distinction has weakened (see Beutler, 2017).
Boorstin described the pseudo-event in language strikingly similar to Baudrillard’s (1983) description of simulacra and simulations. From Boorstin (1987 [1961]), We begin to be puzzled about what is really the ‘original’ of an event. The authentic news record of what ‘happens’ or is said comes increasingly to seem to be what is given out in advance. … The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. (pp. 19, 37)
And here’s Baudrillard (1983): The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory … All media and the official news service only exist to maintain the illusion of actuality – of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of the facts. (pp. 2, 71)
Baudrillard (1983), however, went a step further, arguing not only that pseudo-events or simulations are so seductive as to overshadow actual events, but also that we have erased any meaningful difference: [I]t is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real. Thus all hold-ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold-ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media … (p. 41)
Baudrillard offered the example of Disneyland, which ‘is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real’ (p. 25).
To synthesize Baudrillard and Boorstin through these examples, the media, ever seeking to meet our expectations for the extraordinary, can now both produce and fulfill our expectations in a loop that requires nothing from us. Bennett (2003), in his critique of political news, wrote, [S]tories seldom contain much information beyond that provided by politicians and resource-rich interest organizations. These dominant news sources routinely rely on market research to package their messages in terms that targeted publics already have in mind – raising questions about how often the news is likely to stimulate learning or helpful democratic deliberation. (p. 8, emphasis added)
We have witnessed the results of the lulling effects of political news that adheres to the agendas and schedules of politicians and their operatives. There is little about contemporary politics, at least in the United States, that could be deemed healthy or productive. We have little to lose by trying new approaches to public affairs coverage. I propose one such approach below.
Non-representational theory
A key feature of the pseudo-event is that it must be represented to become reality. The un-represented pseudo-event is like the tree that falls in a witness-free forest; it might as well not have happened. Reporters who cover contrived political appearances thus co-create the events with the planners and participants (Fowler, 1991); they become not neutral observers but willing partners in the illusion. Due to the dependence of pseudo-events on representation, an intriguing way to intervene is to consult the realm of non-representational theory (NRT).
NRT – or non-representational theories, or, usefully for this study, more-than-representational theory (Lorimer, 2005) – is an approach to research that is more immanent, more personal, more experientially oriented, and more future-directed than most traditional academic scholarship. Originating in cultural geography (e.g. Dewsbury, 2010; Geoghegan and Woodyer, 2014; Lorimer, 2008; Thrift, 2008), applied in education (e.g. Fendler, 2016; Zembylas, 2016), and recently introduced in journalism and science communication (Parks, 2017), NRT incorporates elements of the performing arts and a variety of post-structural and post-modern ontologies and epistemologies (Vannini, 2015) to pay close attention to the pantheon of influences occurring right now that affect and make possible what will happen next. It is concerned, primarily, with bodies in spaces and the affective impulses on those bodies. NRT erases any ‘categorical or epistemological distinction between signs, symbols, referents and realities’ as well as ‘distinctions among pictures, models, displays or depictions and reality’ (Fendler and Smeyers, 2015: 692). Its essence is not representation, but presentation (Fendler and Smeyers, 2015). Non-representational theorists see elements of non-representational style in many areas of inquiry that do not necessarily claim the NRT mantle, including actor–network theory, neomaterialism, post-structuralist feminism, critical theory, and pragmatism (Vannini, 2015). It is an approach that straddles paradigms by ‘pull[ing] the energy of the performing arts into the social sciences’ (Thrift, 2008: 12). These diverse influences are united under NRT by ‘a sense of affirmation and experimentation’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 2) – that is, experimentation in the sense of constantly trying things out.
NRT is an intrinsically joyful approach to research and a style of observation that can be applied to journalistic reporting. It ‘tries to be restless and willfully immature’ (Vannini, 2015: 5). It is an antidote to the cynical manipulations that underlie public affairs. Geoghegan and Woodyer (2014: 219), following Thrift (2008) in writing against ‘disenchantment’ in scholarly research, ask, ‘How can we embrace and nurture a child-like enthusiasm for the world, and how can we encourage others within and beyond our sub-disciplinary audiences to turn up the color and tune in?’ They answer that ‘we need to challenge the extant habits of critical thinking’ which ‘aim to negate the possibility of surprise’ (p. 224). Rather than being taken in by pseudo-events and propaganda, or unreflexively imbuing them with irresistible manipulative powers, NRT offers tools to usurp them with vividness and wide-eyed attention that takes into account much broader inputs and influences than are traditionally considered politically relevant in newsgathering.
For the purposes of this study, three aspects of NRT are particularly salient. They are affect, immanence, and the disabling of ‘autopilot’, discussed below.
Affect
As generally employed in non-representational research, affect is not a synonym for emotions that can be assessed on a Likert scale or measured physiologically. Rather, the concept addresses the primal forces of sensory input, somatic intensity, conscious and subconscious memory, ingrained habits, and patterns of thought that combine to influence cognition and behavior in each moment. Affect is ‘a pull and a push, an intensity of feeling, a sensation, a passion, an atmosphere, an urge, a mood, a drive’ (Vannini, 2015: 8–9). It is the arousal of feeling that often and easily supersedes appeals to strict rational or critical thought, although it can also facilitate clear thinking (Papacharissi, 2014). It is the dark energy of human interaction, accounting for the enormous bulk of activity while receiving little attention. ‘Affects are not about you or it, subject or object. They are relations that inspire the world’ (Dewsbury et al., 2002: 439).
Conceptually, affect is of increasing importance as global public affairs endure a moment many are dubbing ‘post-factual’ or ‘post-truth’ due to the contemporary failure of rational arguments to lead publics to evidence-based outcomes on matters such as climate change and national elections. As a commentator wrote on the US. presidential election, [T]he media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter. … Even fact-checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated. (Glasser, 2016)
When we speak of the failure of factual information to drive rational decisions among individuals or publics, we are speaking of the affective forces (the remnants of which are represented in social science as motivated reasoning, cognitive bias, etc.) that are overriding rational interpretations. Affect, then, is vitally important to public affairs and democratic processes, but it is almost entirely overlooked by journalists, who are trained to dispassionately recount events and allow facts to speak for themselves. Feelings and cognitive processes interact in complex ways to motivate political responses (Papacharissi, 2014), and to focus solely on facticity in journalism is to ignore the primary mover in this continuum of input, entanglement, and response. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was pure affect; its European antecedent, Brexit, was a similar phenomenon. Journalists’ failure to understand that continuous reporting of Trump’s outrageous statements helped spread his waves of affective persuasion was due in part to their belief that calling attention to the outrageousness might quell, rather than amplify, Trump’s impact. NRT allows journalists to expose and dilute these highly relevant but previously unheralded political influences by exploring experiential moments, affective intensities, and performative possibilities.
Immanence
In my understanding of NRT, immanence means: what’s here, now. For NRT, what is here is everything, and the binary categories that separate the material from the abstract, the important from the trivial, and the foreground from the background do not apply. Fendler and Smeyers (2015), following Deleuze and Guattari via Anderson and Harrison (2010), write that NRT places all phenomena on the ‘same plane of immanence’ and illustrate with an array of things that exist equivalently on this plane: ‘beliefs, atmospheres, sensations, ideas, toys, music, ghosts, dance therapies, footpaths, pained bodies, trance music, reindeer, plants, boredom, fat, anxieties, vampires, cars, enchantment, nanotechnologies, water voles, GM Foods, landscapes, drugs, money, racialised bodies, political demonstrations’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 14, quoted in Fendler and Smeyers, 2015: 693). The point of the list is to break down hierarchies between ideas and things, subjects and objects, into an ontology in which everything has an opportunity to make a difference (Fendler, 2016). A benefit of this stance is the freedom to look beyond the commonsensical entities to which we are trained to attend – for journalists: the politician at a microphone, the five W’s in a press release – and pay attention to the extraordinary range of sights, sounds, smells, feelings, attitudes, memories, and desires that can subtly influence political motivations. To do so, to recognize that often the ‘little’ things can matter as much as the ‘big’ ones, is to radically expand the notion of ‘objectivity’ (see Mindich, 1998) that journalists hold so dear (Parks, 2017).
An example of the breadth of experiential immanence appears in Boorstin’s (1987 [1961]) exegesis on pseudo-events. He describes Kurt Lang’s sociological study of the different experiences of Douglas MacArthur’s (1951) welcome-home parade in Chicago as witnessed by people in the crowd and people watching on television. On TV, the General was the continuous center of attraction … [O]ne received the impression of wildly cheering and enthusiastic crowds before, during, and after the parade … yet in many cases the cheering, waving, and shouting were really a response not so much to the General as to the aiming of the camera. (p. 27)
Meanwhile, on the ground, ‘Actual spectators, with sore feet, suffered long periods of boredom. Many groups were apathetic … [I]n some places they waited for hours and then were lucky to have a fleeting glimpse of the General’ (p. 27). Traditionally, journalists would call the carefully staged, produced, and directed television coverage of the parade a ‘mirror’ of the reality of MacArthur’s welcome (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). NRT, however, invites us to take in a much wider plane of reality – accounting for the waiting, the boredom, the sore feet, the poor visibility, as Lang did, and additionally, the more ephemeral affective ‘atmospheres’ among participants that abut and commingle in constantly fluctuating material conditions (Anderson and Ash, 2015). These experiences are not as straightforward or stirring as what was witnessed on TV, but they are certainly as ‘real’, and, in terms of the political conditioning of the people who did and did not live them, they are as relevant.
Disabling ‘autopilot’
A chief characteristic of NRT is its ability to evoke wonder through conscious appreciation of the everyday and close attention to details that often escape our notice. Cultural geographers Geoghegan and Woodyer (2014) consider ‘what it would be like to live every day excited by the world’ (p. 218) and ‘describing rather than explaining wonder away’ (p. 223). Rinehart (2010) calls for introducing ‘poetic sensibilities, humanities and wonder’ to research in the sociology of sport (p. 184). Thrift (2008) encourages ‘taking some of the small things of everyday life for wonders’ (p. 2). To experience and present this wonder on a regular basis necessitates looking at familiar situations in new ways. Fendler (2016) describes this intention as ‘disabling autopilot’ and argues for the disruption of formulaic writing and presentation in academic publishing. The same challenge could fall to journalists: Reporters covering political events are usually running on autopilot through well-established routines (e.g. Tuchman, 1978) that wear ruts in public discourse (e.g. Fowler, 1991). They stand in the same place and take the same pictures of the same people from the same angles. They listen for the same talking points to employ in similar-sounding quotes and leads. If a flack tells them the news of the day is a candidate looking at a hot dog, they make the hot dog the news of the day.
One can see how this autopiloting does little for the political imagination. And as political norms are disrupted or used to undermine traditional journalism (e.g. Oremus, 2017), following these habitual patterns grows increasingly self-destructive. As Rosen (2017) argues in advising news organizations to stop serving as props at the pseudo-event known as the White House press briefing, ‘The press has to become less predictable’, in part because ‘[T]hey can’t visit culture war upon you if they don’t know where you are’. Being less predictable means coming off autopilot, eschewing routines, and confronting the world with an opener mind. The United States’ most heralded journalists tend to be known for doing just that. The March 2017 death of legendary New York columnist Jimmy Breslin unleashed numerous appreciations for both his poetic writing and his stubborn resistance to the predictable. Among the most famous examples of Breslin’s work is his interview with the man who dug John F. Kennedy’s grave while other reporters attended Kennedy’s funeral (Breslin, 2013). The story is an example of a reporter disabling autopilot to honor the immanence of humanity – placing the grave-digger on the same plane of significance as the president he helped bury.
Because NRT collapses boundaries among subjects and objects, material things and representations – ‘the “real” and the “really made-up” are revealed as synonyms’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 9) – applying it to Boorstin’s conceptualization of pseudo-events’ ‘ambivalent relationship’ with an underlying reality could be problematized as conflicting with a non-representational ontology. ‘More-than-representational theory’ permits us to move in both paradigms. We begin in the representational world where pseudo-events are conceived and where a specific set of discursive habits and semiotic values are rutted into their planning, execution, coverage, and reception – and then we use non-representational approaches to expand that world, such that the represented pseudo-event becomes the lived event, unbeholden to familiar patterns and scripts, allowed to unfold within its unique circumstances, presented on a universal plane of immanence, following affective trails where they lead.
A non-representational journalistic effort would involve reporters putting down certain assumptions about what is and is not relevant to political life. It would involve accepting that their self-perceptions as pure ‘mirrors’ of social reality are flawed, that ‘What is conveyed to the public via the news media can never replicate the event as experienced by the participants actually present at the scene of the action’ (Lang and Lang, 1989: 123), at least in part because every participant’s experience is influenced by innumerable untraceable phenomena dating from infancy to what they had for breakfast or the pebble in their shoe or their last text message. Non-representational journalism can undermine the illusion of cohesive experiences by presenting discordant, unscripted, or unusual images from pseudo-events that render the event unique and strange instead of polished and rehearsed – an aim journalists often express in principle but reject in practice. Bennett (2003) writes, The paradox is that journalists complain about over-scripted campaigns, and, more generally, the staged events they cover, but they seem unable to find other ways to write stories or to replace the cynical tone with perspectives that might help citizens become more engaged. (p. 43)
As Rinehart (2010) writes of scholars in a manner applicable to journalists, ‘It is not an overstatement to say that we have had the magic trained out of us’ (p. 197). The intervention described below offers possibilities for resisting the inevitable, and restoring the magic.
Method and findings
I performed my non-representational journalistic intervention at a fall 2016 campaign rally for Hillary Clinton featuring her chief primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a field on the campus of a Midwestern university. Sanders had been touring to promote Clinton’s campaign with a goal of recreating the energy he had summoned among young voters during the Democratic primary. The rally had been announced in the press and across social media, and participants were encouraged to RSVP. Conceptually, the rally met Boorstin’s (1987 [1961]) criteria for a pseudo-event: it was planned in advance; it was organized and staged for maximum journalistic accessibility; it bore no referent beyond its existence as an event to promote Clinton; and it aimed to fulfill its own prophecy – to generate enthusiasm for Clinton’s campaign by producing and disseminating images of enthusiasm for Clinton’s campaign.
One could argue that such an event, despite meeting Boorstin’s criteria, offered more intrinsic news value than the Pence hot-dog episode because Sanders would espouse campaign rhetoric that might nominally inform voters. It could also be argued that each event performed a specific campaign function necessary for making political evaluations: The Sanders rally spoke to policy, and the Pence event to character. But neither policy nor character is well revealed through traditional coverage in which the semiotic train is driven by political handlers, with the ensuing messages tightly scripted and responses preordained. My objective at the Sanders event was to present sounds and images via a live Twitter feed (#NRT_Sanders), but to puncture the simulacrumatic aspects of the predetermined content by turning off the autopilot of my journalistic training and seeking inputs from the broader plane of immanence to expand the universe of politically relevant experiences. What follows is a rough chronology of what I did before, during, and after the rally, and why I did it.
About an hour and a half before the event, I walked to the designated field, which was cordoned off in roughly the shape and size of a baseball field by slender lines of waist-high black straps, guarded by volunteers who insisted that people text to a campaign phone number to confirm their attendance or, if they were just passing through, to walk around the nearly empty space rather than intrude upon it. A stage was set up at the far end of the field, faced by a grandstand for credentialed press. A warm-up band played upbeat rock music for a few dozen early arrivals. Aside from the volunteers and the cordons, the atmosphere resembled a small-scale student event where one might sign up for a club and receive a free water bottle. On my end, in the ‘outfield’ away from the stage, a vendor sat behind tables of campaign swag and chatted idly with scattered arrivals. On the sidewalk behind me, a sandwich-board wearing supporter of Green Party candidate Jill Stein paced, periodically hollering, ‘Show us what DemExit looks like! This is what DemExit looks like!’ and issuing taunts contrasting the meager pre-rally crowds with the thousands who had assembled on the same campus for Sanders months earlier.
My process as one of the first intentionally non-representational campaign reporters was to survey the scene for the commonsense, natural journalistic shots, and then expand the boundaries of newsworthiness. I knew routine images would include the vendor and his wares, volunteers interacting with rally-goers, and the swaggering Stein supporter. To complement such anticipated content, I sought sounds and images one would not predict, to encourage people to consider the event from a different perspective, to jolt them from autopilot with the unexpected, and perhaps to evoke a generative affective response. So while the Stein supporter paced and hollered, I pointed my iPhone upward toward a lovely swaying tree and pushed the record button. The resulting video clip portrays the graceful limbs and leaves backdropped by a sky mottled with clouds, with wind buffering the microphone. In a faint afterthought, one can hear the disembodied cry of ‘Show us what DemExit looks like …’ Thus, the traditional journalistic content of a political speech act – the words of the goading protester – were presented on the same plane of immanence as the natural atmosphere in which they were uttered. The political language was both de- and re-contextualized in a potentially generative way. Such a move comports with NRT’s goal to ‘redirect attention from the posited meaning towards the material compositions and conduct of representations’ (Dewsbury et al., 2002: 438, emphasis in original).
Awaiting the main event and what I expected to be an ever-increasing crowd, I shot more pictures around the perimeter (leftward and rightward-facing red arrows along the rope line, an angled picture of a row of bicycles) and then completed my required texting and form-filling for admission to the event. A notable lack of new people streamed into the venue. I approached the stage and noted the full grandstand of reporters and photographers. At ground level, dozens of young people faced the stage, listening to the band. I recognized many journalism students, including my own, whom I had assigned to cover and live-tweet the event using conventional reporting methods. It occurred to me that a substantial proportion of attendees were, in fact, student reporters assigned by their professors to cover it. This only added to my understanding of the rally as a pseudo-event or simulation: staged for apprentice journalists to practice covering political events by covering one produced on their own campus.
Shortly before the band was ushered offstage, the leader passed on a message from the Clinton campaign encouraging the audience to text a phone number, adding amiably, ‘I’m not sure what it’s for’ and joking that maybe people might win something. I recorded this traditionally non-newsworthy but nevertheless evocative commentary with the camera trained loosely on a chalked line on the grassy field. When lower-bill speakers – a labor leader, a statewide judicial candidate – began addressing the crowd that had amassed to a few hundred, I continued looking for non-traditional images that might help people experience the broader plane of immanence on which the rally was occurring. I spent a lot of time with my back to the stage, watching the action behind me. In this way, I caught a couple of women rushing past, one hefting a toddler, in the thrall of some affective exchange.
When Sanders arrived, a cheer ran through the crowd and a small sea of onlookers parted to clear a path to the stage. It was my first in-person glimpse of Sanders – this larger-than-life character who had been one of the most electrifying personalities in the country for months – and I distinctly recall feeling … nothing. It was as though I were seeing him on television; the face was so familiar, the scenario of him greeting a crowd of young people so ingrained in my head, that the ‘reality’ of his presence was superseded by the multitude of digitized simulacra that preceded him. I felt attuned to Baudrillard’s (1983) concept of the simulation; he called it ‘the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV’ (p. 55).
The rest of the event was preordained: Sanders would ascend the stage, would utter more or less the same words in more or less the same order that he had been uttering in several locations earlier in the day and across the country for weeks. The small but partisan crowd would cheer at the appropriate times. The assembled news media would take the appropriate close-ups, the medium shots, and the face-in-the-crowd reactions; would capture the most pithy or energetic quote and sound bite; and would report dutifully for the Internet and the evening news and the morning paper as though the message were new and unique. Rejecting autopilot, I recorded bits of speech backdropped by evocative or mundane imagery, focusing on backpacks, on the sky, and on Sanders’ disembodied voice echoing from the massive building across the street. Such images had the simultaneous potential to disrupt viewers’ expectations of what happens at a political rally and to attune them to Sanders’ actual words by divorcing the language from the simulacra that trigger cognitive biases and shut down active listening. A particularly poignant clip features Sanders calling to preserve ‘a healthy, inhabitable planet’ while rain splashes gently on a stanchion in the grass.
Meanwhile, traditional media coverage of the event – at which, recall, professional and student reporters constituted a sizeable proportion of the participants – was generally predictable. The local daily newspaper featured a photograph of Sanders grinning or wincing as he waited to speak amid a sea of arms holding phones trained on his visage, a shot from the press grandstand overlooking the crowd as Sanders spoke, and a photo of a lone Trump supporter stoically holding a ‘Make America Great Again’ sign. The story’s lead read, ‘On the stump for Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders told an audience … on Thursday that this election is about income inequality and restoring the middle class in America’. It went on to quote Sanders lambasting Trump for his bigotry. The campus newspaper featured a photo of Sanders gesturing on stage before a sea of arms holding phones trained on his visage. It noted that ‘Sanders spoke about rights for women, the LGBT community and the homeless population. He also emphasized the importance of voting and that college tuition debt needs to be reduced’. A local TV station featured clips of Sanders gesturing at the podium from middle range and pulled back to show a sea of arms holding phones trained on his visage. The station also netted a one-on-one interview with Sanders, where it obtained these exclusive remarks: Ask the people … if we should raise the minimum wage to a living wage. They do. Ask the people … if we need pay equity for women. They do. Ask the people … if they think that we should make public college and universities free for the middle class so that their kids can go to college and not leave deeply in debt. They do. Those are Clinton’s positions.
Compare the local coverage of this particular Sanders rally with a convenience sample of reporting from rallies across the country: Sen. Bernie Sanders told a crowd of about 250 at Youngstown State University on Thursday that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has ‘gotten me very upset and very angry’. Looking over a room of students and teachers on Tuesday at Dartmouth College, Sen. Bernie Sanders decided to conduct an informal poll. ‘How many people here have student debt?’ the progressive Vermonter asked the roughly 425 people gathered in Alumni Hall. Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke at the University of Cincinnati to campaign for Hillary Clinton Thursday afternoon. … ‘What this election is about is which candidate has the ideas and the program to improve life for the working families and the middle class of this country’, he said.
While the writers of these stories did their jobs to localize the rallies and occasionally provide narrative or description that distinguished their work from their peers’, the essence of this content is indistinguishable: Bernie Sanders said the same thing at every event, and people reacted the same way, and but for a few local details a story written in Boston could have been written in Columbus could have been written in Madison. The simulacrum of Sanders preceded itself wherever he went.
Meanwhile, as the rally that anchors this study ended and Sanders disappeared, the Pharrell Williams song ‘Happy’ piped through speakers suspended from cranes brought in for the event. People began filing away down the snaking sidewalk toward other parts of campus, and one of my final clips is of people departing in orderly, unidirectional groups of one, two, or three – a tonal contrast with the music whose official video features a diverse array of people in various states of public dancing and singing. The last clip I took is actually reminiscent of the ‘Happy’ video, featuring a wide shot of three young women skipping into the distance in apparent affective connection with the music. I had turned the camera on too late and missed the best parts of this scene, but it made me happy to shoot it.
Discussion
The purpose of this article is to introduce a journalistic intervention into routinized, propagandistic political ‘pseudo-events’ (Boorstin, 1987 [1961]) that over time can lull reporters and citizens into stultified complacency about the electoral process while facilitating highly disciplined campaigns’ messaging at the expense of more substantive or broad-minded examination of issues facing voting publics. The intervention was inspired by scholarship on non-representational theory, a style of research that aims to disrupt automatic routines and encourage people to recognize possibilities for change in each moment. The method was to cover a standard political rally, as much as possible, from a perspective untethered to routine journalistic or political cues of what is and is not important, to widen our understanding of political relevance and open possibilities for political engagement through affective experience.
This effort was clearly not an attempt to coherently represent the message of Sanders or the event organizers, but, as an act of journalism, it was a no less accurate rendering of what occurred in that place at that time than the sound bites and images recorded more conventionally by the press on hand. A difference was that my images and recordings privileged the space as well as those who temporarily filled it, because spaces affect our potential to respond. To veer from preordained and interchangeable simulacrumatic images during made-for-media political events is to express a level of independence that journalists claim to aspire to but rarely perform. Such efforts also challenge the received view that standard event coverage represents the true ‘reality’ of what happened; they demonstrate that infinite realities are available depending on how one orients one’s attention.
Preordained words and images from a scripted rally such as Sanders’ may have some utility in preparing citizens for an election, but it is minimal. The content is, first, predictable, in that almost everyone knows what they will see before they see it. It is boring, in its sameness. It is manipulative, in its tested and packaged messaging. It is affectively arousing only in triggering habituated cues of attraction or revulsion, depending on the predispositions of the viewer. It contains political possibility within a very narrow band. This article argues that we can broaden the band by expanding our definition of what is politically relevant to a wider range of sensory and intellectual experience. Everything that took place in the venue of the Sanders rally was, in one way or another, political, because the background that people experienced – the light rain, the music, the dancing – affected the ways people heard, felt, and processed what Sanders had to say. NRT invites us to notice those subtle influences along with the obvious ones. By presenting unexpected images and experiences, this coverage can circumvent motivated reasoning and political habit patterns, opening the possibility for political ideas to resonate.
It is worth repeating that NRT is also conceived as ‘more-than-representational’ (Lorimer, 2005) in that it allows for traditional representation and the many elements of experience that are so often left out of our efforts to understand what’s happening now and what could happen next. A unified non-representational report of political events might blend traditional representational images and text with any other images and ideas that catch the reporter’s affective attention, placing the scripted and the experiential on the same plane of immanence and widening our understanding of what is politically relevant by increasing the range of actors that can make an explicit difference in forging political attitudes. This allows the journalist to perform her normative informational role for some citizens and to work toward journalism’s normative responsibility to make more people feel welcome to political experiences. To insist a priori that common-sense shots and scripted sound bites constitute the full range of politically relevant data from a campaign rally reflects a longstanding journalistic bias that has rendered politics irrelevant or insensible for huge swaths of people. A more normatively objective approach would be to present content from the scripted speech and multiple inputs from the attendant atmosphere, and let citizens decide which aspects are politically meaningful for them. For my part, the background dancing, running, and joking at Sanders’ rally made me feel hopeful and engaged, and juxtaposing his scripted words against unfamiliar backdrops made me more attentive, not less, to his message.
The intent of this project is not to argue that all reporting, even of pseudo-events, should eschew traditional representational methods. So how do we know when a non-representational reporting intervention might be constructive? How do we distinguish between a pseudo-event like Pence’s hot-dog viewing and an event that might fit Boorstin’s criteria but yield more beneficial voter information, like an unscripted town hall meeting? The answer depends on the paradigm. Normative news judgment would suggest that the more likely new information of a certain type is to be revealed – insight into the candidate’s character or temperament, a policy nuance, hints at the mood of voters – the more democratically beneficial and perhaps the less ‘pseudo’ the event will be.
Within a non-representational approach, however, such judgment is suspended. By placing all possibilities on the same plane of immanence, by scanning for politically relevant information and insights across a much wider expanse of affective observation, the distinction between the ‘pseudo’ and the ‘real’ event disappears. A non-representational approach to Pence and the hot-dog bun might include enough behind-the-scenes material, and enough discordant imagery, to penetrate the farce of political-press relations and render the event as revealing as a town hall meeting. Many pool reports themselves, before they are sanitized into conventional news stories, carry performative humor and pathos that, if shared with citizens, would let them in on the joke.
Journalists have not left the modern era; in fact, they cling to it with delusionary fervor. But, thanks in part to Trump’s bulldozing of political norms and in larger part to the media trends that enable him, the modern era has left journalists. While pseudo-events have been with us for at least a century (Boorstin, 1987 [1961]), their recent conflation with propaganda and the ‘post-truth’ crisis has rendered them dangerous in a way that traditional journalistic norms, such as piling fact on top of fact, cannot combat. Normative journalistic processes have not led in recent years to normative democratic outcomes in any Habermasian, deliberative sense – and not for lack of facts, which are abundant and accessible. Reporting facts may be necessary, but is surely insufficient, to induce meaningful democratic participation (Parks, 2017). So, do journalists continue to operate from 20th-century values that contemporary politics has rendered obsolete? Or do they recognize what they are up against and join the fray? A non-representational approach helps dissolve normative constraints that render journalists and citizens helpless against non-normative political actors by allowing them to be as adaptable and unpredictable as the manipulators. Tipping the power to construct political meaning in favor of citizens is a highly relevant journalistic act.
As to whether the present intervention succeeded, I’m aware of no basis on which to judge this type of journalism research, beyond the effect it has on you and me. From my own experience, I would offer a qualified ‘yes’. My reporting was different from any coverage I witnessed of this particular rally or any political rally I’ve seen. My efforts ensured that I, for one, was fully awake to the experience and attuned to its unique aspects rather than focusing solely on the automatic conventions that made it the same as every other Bernie Sanders rally. My Twitter hashtag (#NRT_Sanders) includes video clips that some viewers might find perplexing, intriguing, puzzling, delighting, and perhaps infuriating – all affective responses that standard coverage would be unlikely to evoke. It expands what the canon of the event’s coverage allows for as ‘real’ and relevant – as did Kurt Lang in the MacArthur parade experiment – by presenting the lived experience of the people in the crowd. It shows that Bernie Sanders was not the only actor – and perhaps not even the primary actor – making a difference on that field that day. Expanding available political experiences might encourage citizens to view propagandistic events in a new light, perhaps to draw on their intellect to fill open spaces with their own thoughts and impressions and to intuit more possible outcomes. The intended effect may be more artistic than traditionally journalistic, but a goal of NRT is to smudge the boundaries between these practices and to produce disruptions – not ‘permanent solutions’, but rather ‘escape attempts, some of which [c]ould take root: a series of fireworks inserted into everyday life’ (Thrift, 2008: 4).
Limitations of this study abound. A better photographer would have conceived and executed more interesting images. I’m not sure any of the work evoked a sense of wonder, a key trait identified by many non-representational researchers. I wish I’d made the video clips longer by 5 or 10 seconds – it’s good to leave people wanting more, but as a viewer I’m just warming up to these evocations when they quit on me. And, respecting NRT’s additive nature, it would have made sense to include traditionally representative sound bites and images among my more unusual posts.
Possibilities are endless for future research into how non-representational approaches can help journalism reassert its autonomy against contrived political messaging, produce generative and affectively powerful content that surprises as well as informs, and empower people to shake off the autopilot that has nearly destroyed somnambulant democracies. Jimmy Breslin’s Kennedy tribute, while in many ways a work of conventional journalism, lends itself to non-representational analysis, as does much of the work of the 1960s ‘New Journalists’. The experiment behind this study, which employs starkly different means than Breslin’s, is a response to current political, cultural, and technological conditions. Instantaneous social sharing, 360° lenses, and virtual reality both necessitate and can facilitate non-representational understandings by opening up who can affect and interpret events.
Due to NRT’s ephemerality – the ideas are intriguing but hard to put into practice within generally accepted research paradigms (Vannini, 2015) – it will take much additional work to thoroughly explore its implications for journalism research. This study is an attempt to use non-representational thinking as a skillful means of disrupting a toxic democratic ritual – as a way of rendering more relevant those events that are designed to lull us to sleep by expanding what can count as relevant. If we believe as a society that journalism should foster widespread and robust political participation, then we need to open ways for politics to manifest beyond existing narrow conceptions. If we keep doing the same kind of journalism, we’re going to keep getting the same kind of democracy.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.