It’s the age of contrivance and the temptation to blame it all on America is overwhelming. If it hadn’t been for American television news shows coming up with the idea of turning news into entertainment, we wouldn’t have the splatterfest of stupidity that fills primetime on our televisions today. Instead of news, we get debates and these are, as critic and historian Daniel Boorstin termed it, “pseudo-events” – events that take place for the sole purpose of being reported. “We begin to be puzzled,” Boorstin wrote in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America , “about what is really the ‘original’ of an event. The authentic record of what ‘happens’ or is said comes increasingly to seem to be what is given out in advance. More and more events become dramatic performances in which ‘men in the news’ simply act out their script. The story prepared ‘for future release’ acquires an authenticity that competes with that of the actual occurrences on the scheduled date.”