Jamie Lynn Spears, a Nickelodeon superstar and the sister of Miss. Britney Spears, announced that she was pregnant last fall at the age of 16. It was big news to some, but teenage girls get pregnant often and the media blew Jamie's story out of proportion. I would most definitely call this a pseudo event. The example is from Access Hollywood, which often airs pseudo events, but other major television networks aired similar reports. Take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2KXpBdO3zA
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http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/showbiz.tonight/
I was originally just going to get on the Showbiz Tonight Web site to find a headline that fits the criteria of a pseudo-event, but after perusing through the CNN talk show's homepage, I decided just to focus on Showbiz Tonight as a whole. It is a breeding ground for pseudo-events.
Because the information on Showbiz Tonight is made available with help from CNN, it is given the illusion of importance. But Showbiz's web page is actually a perfect example of, as Boorstin would say, "filling our consciousness with novelties."
The good people at Showbiz Tonight essentially find an event that generally does not affect many people (i.e. "Hulk and Linda's Big Bucks") and turn it into an event that overshadows news that could potentially affect lots and lots of people (i.e. "Large Hadron Collider sends first proton beam").
While some of the featured occurrences might actually be news (okay - I didn't exactly SEE any right away, but I'm sure they're there sometimes), most of these highlighted happenings meet the characteristics of a pseudo-event: dramatic, easy to make vivid, funded/advertised, repeated at will, sociable and convenient, keeping the consumer "informed," spawning other pseudo-events.
See for yourself. And don't forget to count the exclamation points.
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