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rising tide of pseudo-events washes away the distinction. Here is one example. On June 21, 1960, President Eisenhower was in Honolulu, en route to the Far East for a trip to meet the heads of government in Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere. A seven-column headline in the Chicago
Daily News
brought readers the following information: “What Are Ike’s Feelings About Trip? Aides Mum” “Doesn’t Show Any Worry” “Members of Official Party Resent Queries by Newsmen.” And the two-column story led off:
    H ONOLULU —President Eisenhower’s reaction to his Far Eastern trip remains as closely guarded a secret as his golf score. While the President rests at Kaneohe Marine air station on the windward side of the Pali hills, hard by the blue Pacific and an 18-hole golf course, he might be toting up the pluses and minuses of his Asian sojourn. But there is no evidence of it. Members of his official party resent any inquiry into how the White House feels about the whole experience, especially the blowup of the Japanese visit which produced a critical storm.
    The story concludes: “But sooner or later the realities will intrude. The likelihood is that it will be sooner than later.”
    Nowadays a successful reporter must be the midwife—or more often the conceiver—of his news. By the interview technique he incites a public figure to make statements which will sound like news. During the twentieth century this technique has grown into a devious apparatus which, in skillful hands, can shape national policy.
    The pressure of time, and the need to produce a uniform news stream to fill the issuing media, induce Washington correspondents and others to use the interview and other techniques for making pseudo-events in novel, ever more ingenious and aggressive ways. One of the main facts of life for the wire service reporter in Washington is that there are many more afternoon than morning papers in the United States. The early afternoon paper on the East Coast goes to press about 10 A.M ., before the spontaneous news of the day has had an opportunity to develop. “It means,” one conscientious capital correspondent confides, in Douglass Cater’s admirable
Fourth Branch of Government
(1959), “the wire service reporter must engage in the basically phony operation of writing the ‘overnight’—a story composed the previous evening but giving the impression when it appears the next afternoon that it covers that day’s events.”
    What this can mean in a particular case is illustrated by the tribulations of a certain hard-working reporter who was trying to do his job and earn his keep at the time when the Austrian Treaty of 1955 came up for debate in the Senate. Although it was a matter of some national and international importance, the adoption of the Treaty was a foregone conclusion; there would be little news in it. So, in order to make a story, this reporter went to Senator Walter George, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and extracted a statement to the effect that under the Treaty Austria would receive no money or military aid, only long-term credits. “That became my lead,” the reporter recalled. “I had fulfilled the necessary function of having a story that seemedto be part of the next day’s news.”
    The next day, the Treaty came up for debate. The debate was dull, and it was hard to squeeze out a story. Luckily, however, Senator Jenner made a nasty crack about President Eisenhower, which the reporter (after considering what other wire service reporters covering the story might be doing) sent off as an “insert.” The Treaty was adopted by the Senate a little after 3:30 P.M . That automatically made a bulletin and required a new lead for the story on the debate. But by that time the hard-pressed reporter was faced with writing a completely new story for the next day’s morning papers.
    But my job had not finished. The Treaty adoption bulletin had gone out too late to get into most of the