Pseudo-Events

In Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, he argues that, given the wealth of news outlets in America, there are an awful lot of pages that reporters have to fill.  Therefore, “[t]he successful reporter is one who can find a story . . . If he cannot find a story, then he must make one . . .”

If the reporter’s digging and imagination both come up dry, then the news that gets reported may be nothing more than a “think piece” or “speculation about startling things to come”—or, worse yet, a rankings puff piece.  In sum, “news” is now “anything that makes a reader say, ‘Gee whiz!’”

In light of his words, I couldn’t help but notice two pieces of pseudo-news recently—Boorstin would call them stories about “pseudo-events.”  These two current examples fall under the heading of “career news”—a category that is now a big business in itself—and involve my former career (accounting) and my current career (law).

The first bit of news reporting is a WSJ article titled “Top Colleges for High-Paying Jobs in Accounting.”  Superficially, it sounds like something newsworthy.  When looking at the rankings, it includes schools like Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, and Northwestern.  Those are “big name” schools.  But as the CPA exam is likely an important part of a successful career in accounting, the author quotes someone who warns that “a school’s ‘star power won’t necessarily get you a great score on the CPA exam.’”

So why is this pseudo-news?  Because it’s a non-story.  Far from getting a “great score on the CPA exam,” you would never even get the chance to take the CPA exam after graduating from one of those “top colleges.”  Why not?  Because Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, and Northwestern don’t even offer accounting majors—or minors!  Some of the other schools on the list of accounting colleges don’t offer accounting studies either.  And you would need a slew of accounting classes—essentially a major or its equivalent—to even sit for the CPA exam. 

It’s hard to see how any of those “top colleges” could be placing graduates in the highest paying accounting jobs without even teaching them accounting.  But assuming the story is technically accurate, it’s far more likely that the few graduates of those schools that managed to get accounting jobs are working, at best, on the fringes of the profession and got those jobs based on their connections, not their studies.  If a would-be accountant goes to one of the above schools hoping for an outcome like that, instead of going to a school that actually offers an accounting major, well, they truly deserve what awaits them.

One of the online comments accurately captured my sentiments.  Alison Nudd wrote, “This is possibly the most useless article I have read about accounting jobs. Come on people[,] at least try to put out good information . . .”  But, as Boorstin warned us, this kind of news is what we get when there are countless pages to fill and reporters are looking for—or perhaps more accurately, making—news.  And if you didn’t catch this news piece in the WSJ, you can find it at multiple other news outlets.  Monkey see, monkey do.

The second story is much more widespread, as law is generally thought to be more exciting than accounting.  The New York Times and virtually every other major news outlet are all reporting on it.  The headline, if I may offer a composite of the numerous subtle variations thereof, is something like this: Harvard, Yale, and a bunch of other law schools have “withdrawn from” or “pulled out of” or “boycotted” the US News law school rankings!

I have tried to correct this myth by explaining that, far from withdrawing from, pulling out of, or boycotting the rankings, all of the schools will still be listed and ranked.  And they know it.  Further, although the protestor-objector schools ostensibly stopped submitting data to the US News—which is some sort of empty virtue signal that doesn’t prevent a school from being ranked—even that might not be true. 

This is more pseudo-news about a pseudo-event, and it’s filling up the print and cyber-pages of countless news outlets.  Once again, reporters are looking to “find” stories, and when they can’t find them, they “make” them.  And this time, the non-event has also created a slew of stories that Boorstin would call “speculation about startling things to come.”  These stories are even more ridiculous, and include predictions of a coming sea-change in, or even the end of, law school rankings entirely!  (Don’t hold your breath, dear reader.)

What’s really amazing, however, is that given the state of today’s news, you’d think that Boorstin was merely describing things as they were happening.  He wasn’t.  He actually died in 2004 and was writing about pseudo-events and pseudo-news long before the advent of the internet and even long before the 24-hour cable news cycle.  Daniel Boorstin wrote The Image in 1962.  

I suspect that, despite his great insight, not even he could have predicted the extent to which he would be right.