“The candidates are brands, and the debates have almost no discussion of ideas or positions, let alone much bearing on what being president actually requires. Instead, debates signify “politics” while allowing for depoliticized analysis”
“Then, after nearly a decade of a president who was a movie actor, Joan Didion’s dispatch from the 1988 campaign trail, “Insider Baseball,” described presidential campaigns as merely media events, made to be covered by specialists “reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported” — a reiteration of Boorstin’s concept of the “pseudo-event.””
“Daniel Boorstin published The Image, two years after telegenic Kennedy’s election over pale, beady Nixon”
“So it has been clear for decades that presidential politics have turned toward the performance of an image. But away from what reality?”
“Boorstin admits that he doesn’t have a solid idea: “I do not know what ‘reality’ is. But somehow I do know an illusion when I see one.””
“All this coverage, ever expanding into more shows, more data, more commentary, and more advertisements, come together to form the thing we’ve accepted as “the election.”
In this process, image-based pseudo-politics don’t come to replace real politics; the real comes to look like an inadequate image.”
“Boorstin argued that, for example, the image of John Wayne made actual cowboys looked like poor imitations. (This is what Jean Baudrillard, writing after Boorstin, meant by “simulation.”)”
“With his steady supply of metacommentary, Trump embodied the pundit-candidate. While his repugnant politics have had material consequences, he campaigned more explicitly at the level of the symbolic, of branding, of the image.”
“His representation of himself as the candidate who rejects political correctness epitomized this: How he talked about issues was trumpeted by the candidate and many of his supporters as the essential point, more important than any policy positions he could be irreverently talking about.”
“When politicians are concerned mainly with producing an “image” — not with what world conditions are actually there, which are heavy and can only change slowly and with great coordinated effort, but with what you see, what they want you to see, what you want to see — they are dealing with something that is light, something easily changed, manipulated, improved, something that flows from moment to moment.”
“Trump appeared to understand intuitively the logic of lightness, that a candidate need only provide an image of a campaign.”
“Trump wasn’t uniquely performative, just uniquely successful at it. If the performance was bombastic, so much the better for its effectiveness. After all, the image is the substance.”
“If the contest is between images, candidates only need an improvised script; everything else leads to inefficiency. The role of a campaign apparatus, from this perspective, is not to conceal how its candidate is “manipulating an image” but to emphasize the degree to which everything is image, including, supposedly, the election’s stakes.”
“By being so transparent in playing a part, by making the theatrics of it all so obvious, Trump offered catharsis for viewers so long served such obvious fictions as “my candidacy is about real issues” and “political coverage cares about the truth.” Accompanying any oft-repeated lie is a build-up in tension, of energy that gets tied up in sustaining it. Part of the Trump phenomenon was what happens when such energy is released.”
“In 1968, to build a television image was to make someone seem effortlessly perfect. Trump was instead risk-prone, erratic, imperfect, and unpredictable. Playing to an audience more savvy about image-making, Trump knew his erratic spontaneity played like honesty. In appearing to make it up as he went along, his calculations and fabrications seemed authentic, even when they consisted of easily debunked lies. It feels less like a lie when you’re in on it.”
“Deception doesn’t need to be total or convincing. Strategically revealing the trick can be a far more effective mode of persuasion.”
“It’s been repeated that the theme of the 2016 campaign is that we’re now living in a “post-truth” world. People seem to live in entirely different realities, where facts and fact-checking don’t seem to matter, where disagreement about even the most basic shape of things seems beyond debate.”
“There is a broad erosion of credibility for truth gatekeepers. On the right, mainstream “credibility” is often regarded as code for “liberal,” and on the left, “credibility” is reduced to a kind of taste, a gesture toward performed expertism. This decline of experts is part of an even longer-term decline in the trust and legitimacy of nearly all social institutions. Ours is a moment of epistemic chaos.”
“While journalists and other experts maintain that truth is basically facts added up, the reality is that all of us, to very different degrees, uncover our own facts and assimilate them to our pre-existing beliefs about what’s true and false, right and wrong.”
“It isn’t just a matter of “filter bubbles” showing people different news, but epistemic closure. Even when people see the same information, it means radically different things to them.”
“Reporter Ned Resnikoff argues this about Trump and his advisers:
They have no interest in creating a new reality; instead, they’re calling into question the existence of any reality. By telling so many confounding and mutually exclusive falsehoods, the Trump campaign has creative a pervasive sense of unreality in which truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision.”
“Baudrillard argued in Fatal Strategies that the world was drowning in information:
We record everything, but we don’t believe it, because we have become screens ourselves, and who can ask of a screen to believe what it records? To simulation we reply by simulation; we have ourselves become systems of simulation. There are people today (the polls tell us so!) that don’t believe in the space shuttle. Here it is no longer a matter of philosophical doubt as to being and appearance, but a profound indifference to the reality principle as an effect of the loss of all illusion.”
“Media produce not truth but spectacle. What is most watchable often has little to do with accuracy, which conforms to and derives from spectacle and remains inconclusive.”
“The media produce the need for more media: The information they supply yields uncertainty rather than clarity; the more information media provide, the more disorientation results.”
“The 2016 election showed once again that journalism’s role is not to clarify the chaos around politics. Rather, an election and its coverage lurch along in a frothing, vertigo-inducing symbiosis.”
“War and terror seems everywhere and nowhere. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls this a “liquid fear,” nihilistic in its perpetual uncertainty. Such fear fosters demand for a simple leader with simple slogans and catastrophically simple answers.”