One of my favorite writers, Joshua Rothman of the New Yorker, wrote a brilliant piece about the way news is magnified and distorted by journalists and by social media.
If you have a chance to read the whole thing, you should:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-the-covington-saga-reveals-about-our-media-landscapeWhat does this have to do with Kyrie Irving? This passage from the article caught my attention when it comes to what's happening with Irving:
Suppose, he writes, that a reporter asks a government official about a sensitive subject and receives an answer, then asks another official the same question and receives a different one. A story can now be written about the rift between the officials. The rift exists only because the reporter asked the questions that he did. Still, now that it’s been articulated, the officials’ difference of opinion is genuinely newsworthy: a topic of discussion has been created on-demand. By this method, Boorstin writes, a news outlet can create a “uniform news stream” of “new-fangled content,” all worthy of readers’ time. Similarly, a politician can stay in the news by staging pseudo-events—leaks, press conferences, and the like—which are both newsworthy and made to order. Newsworthiness, it turns out, doesn’t have to flow from the intrinsic qualities of events themselves. It can also be created by someone who knows how to “embroider and dramatize experience in an interesting way.” Social-media platforms, of course, are specifically designed to encourage such embroidery and dramatization.
The danger of this system, Boorstin observes, is that “pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression.” When a Republican congressman faults Barack Obama for not using the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” that’s a pseudo-event. Obama now has no choice but to explain himself—and when he defends his refusal to use that phrase, he succeeds only in adding another link to the pseudo-event chain. Pseudo-events multiply, spreading over the media landscape and outnumbering real events, many of which occur locally, and are of less dramatic interest.
Sound familiar? I think this is more or less what Irving is referring to when he calls the whole thing "f***ed up". Out of a tiny shred of truth comes a cascade of (mostly) nonsense.
Topic: Kyrie Irving and the NBA "pseudo event" (Read 901 times)