The book gives a particularly trenchant account of the pseudo-event’s role in politics, a realm where canny officials soon realized that they could advance their own agendas by feeding the media’s decreasingly satiable demands. Joseph McCarthy, Boorstin writes, “was a natural genius at creating reportable happenings.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, too. He addressed the public “with a new intimacy,” Boorstin writes, but also “a new subtlety and a new calculatedness.” Poets and playwrights worked alongside speechwriters on his staff. “When the President spoke, almost everyone knew it was a long-planned group production in which F.D.R. was only the star performer.”journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter