"Perhaps you saw footage of Zohran Mamdani at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau: he was there on February 5th, to surprise six couples by officiating their weddings, and to film "The Happiest Government Building in the World," a mayoral YouTube video released on Valentine's Day. Or perhaps you caught him atop the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, in a clip announcing plans to open the roof to public visitors."
"A pseudo-event, he writes, is a media spectacle that has an "ambiguous" relationship to any underlying reality. It is "not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. . . . It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced." A press conference is the archetypal pseudo-event; award ceremonies and interviews also qualify."
Zohran Mamdani has made frequent, highly visible appearances across New York in his first weeks as mayor. He officiated surprise weddings at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau on February 5th and filmed a mayoral YouTube video released on Valentine’s Day. He appeared atop the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building to announce plans to open the roof to visitors, rode the W train, and held a press conference on a Bronx bus. Videos and instructions ran on LinkNYC kiosks and Taxi TV. These actions exemplify the modern pseudo-event: planned media spectacles aimed primarily at being reported or reproduced.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]