Leon Hadar: On the Pseudo-Events in Lebanon

Leon Hadar, in the Business Times Singapore (3-11-05):

IN The Image, Daniel Boorstin's ground-breaking and magisterial study of the rise of the modern media and the public relations profession, the renowned historian coined the term 'pseudo-event'.

He was referring to a 'happening' that is designed to be covered by the news. It is not spontaneous, but come about because someone has planned, planted or incited it. It is planted for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. And it is usually intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When Mr Boorstin, the 12th Librarian of US Congress, published The Image in 1962, its notion that the American media was manipulated by powerful forces to create a 'synthetic novelty' aimed at influencing opinion makers and the public was considered really newsworthy.

Mr Boorstin, as the Economist magazine noted in its obituary of the historian, was 'the first to describe the phenomena of non-news, spin, the cult of the image and the worship of celebrity'.

In short, Mr Boorstin was predicting the kind of media environment that engulfs us in the first decade of the 21st century, in which much of what our 24/7 cable television news networks are engaged in is covering 'pseudo events' that are designed to fill newspapers and television screens, and to stimulate the never-ending chatter by pundits.

I re-read The Image in recent days as I was watching the television images of demonstrators in Beirut and recalled a short 70s film that focused on the making of a pseudo-event. The film began by showing a three-minute-long segment from the CBS Evening News reporting on a group of young anti-Vietnam War activists protesting in front of a Pentagon military-recruiting office.

Those were very powerful images of sexy and 'cool' women and men, chanting anti-governments slogans, carrying colourful placards, creating a sense that they were about to break through the barricades and storm the Bastille. But then the film also showed the viewer the raw film material that ended up being cut and edited into three minutes of 'news'.

As the camera lenses refocused on the setting of the 'demonstration' we discovered a small group of less than 10 protesters standing all alone in front of an entrance to a huge office building. People go in and out of the building without paying any attention to them. The 'pseudo event' is exposed as a hoax. What we have here, we say to ourselves, is not a re-run of the French Revolution, but a bunch of uninvited losers trying to crash a party.

Leaders of the two camps that have held demonstrations in Beirut in recent days - the members of the coalition of Christians, Muslim and Druze demanding that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon and the Hizbollah-led Shiite activists who praise Syria's role in that country - have both claimed the other side is involved in spinning 'pseudo-events'.

Shiites, about 40 per cent of the Lebanon's citizens, allege that the anti-Syrian demonstrations were orchestrated by outsiders (read: Americans) and ridicule them as the 'Gucci Revolution', arguing that the anger is confined to the small section of the Westernised upper classes.

The heads of anti-Syrian demonstrators, on the other hand, celebrate their demonstrators as the 'Cedar Revolution', in support of political freedom and suggest that the protests in support of Syria have been staged by Damascus and its lackeys in Lebanon.

But if Lebanon has become a stage for clash between two contrasting 'pseudo events', it's the proponents of the 'Cedar Revolution' in the West who have been responsible for igniting it.

Indeed, for close to three weeks, US President George W Bush and his aides have been very effective in spinning the 'happening' in Beirut so as to ensure that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We were told that the 'Cedar Revolution' was nothing less than another grand episode in an 1848-like cycle of political uprisings that include Georgia ('Rose Revolution') and Ukraine ('Orange Revolution'), and that are now, thanks to American policy and propelled by the elections in Iraq ('Purple Revolution') and Palestine, spilling over into the Middle East, and include the first-ever municipal elections in Saudi Arabia and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak's announcement that the forthcoming presidential election would involve candidates other than himself.

What the Shiites in Lebanon have tried to achieve through their own 'pseudo event' in Beirut was to counter the American-induced one by making sure that the proponents of the 'Cedar Revolution' won't succeed in setting the agenda.

The Shiite demonstrators were not as sexy and 'cool' as their anti-Syrian counterparts, but they projected enormous political (and demographic) strength that has raised questions about the spin adopted by the American media - that the 'Cedar Revolution' was a genuine manifestation of the wishes of most of the Lebanese.

In fact, both in Iraq and Lebanon, 'pseudo events' have been utilised to advance the spin (that seems to be embraced by many liberal internationalists) according to which we have been witnessing the birth of a political spring in the form of Western liberal democracy in the Middle East.

But to apply Mr Boorstin's insights here, the relation of the vote in Iraq and Palestine, the demonstrations in Lebanon, and the steps by Egypt and Saudi Arabia to the underlying situation in the Middle East is quite ambiguous. Both the elections in Iraq and Palestine have been conducted under foreign military occupation - the kind Washington wants to end in Lebanon - and from that perspective they don't necessarily mark the coming of a spring....