"A Person Who Is Known for His Well-Knownness"

"Clearly, Boorstin was a scold and a culturally conservative one at that. He detested the manufactured, the contrived and the confected, and he coined a term that was so widely embraced it would become the subtitle of the book's paperback edition: 'A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.' The pseudo-event was a 'happening' that was not spontaneous but that was designed precisely to be reported or reproduced. A news conference, a photo-op, a movie premiere, an award ceremony, even a presidential debate—all these are staged, in his analysis, simply to get media attention or, in postmodernist terms, to get attention for attention's sake. They have no intrinsic value or at least not the intrinsic value they purport to have. Similarly, a celebrity is a 'human pseudo-event'—a personality who is devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times looks back to Daniel Boorstin's The Image, upon the book's fiftieth anniversary.