2. Selling Politicians, Creating Celebrity
• Celebrity = media personality (their fame
derives from their image constantly in the
public domain… Boorstin: Fame no longer
requires doing anything great. It simply
requires gaining media exposures..We
filled our world with artificial fame..
• Celebrity : image or trademark, create by
media, big name, always keep his/her
performance properly in the public eye
3. • Celebrity as mediated persona: absolutely
dependent on the media to create and
disseminate a persona to an audience
(build and spread constructed charisma).
• People can only become celebrities
through the transmission of their image;
celebrity by definition requires mediation.
Celebrity, therefore, only available by
means of the text that circulate to create
an image of that person.
4. The rise of Political Celebrity
• Celebrity-ness is a phenomenon tied to
the rise of visual mass media…”we
believe we know these people even
though we don’t.
• In the hands of spin doctors,
manufacturing familiarity becomes a
powerful tool for steering mass public
(celebrity construction).
5. Althusser : The notion of interpellation (hailing or
calling)
• “we are positioned within a system of language. When
we respond to someone “hailing” us, we (unconsciously)
accept our social position, and the person calling us.
..These positions are socially constructed and share
through the language.
• Celebrities = “ordinary people” (the more ordinary the
better) who have been elevated to fame..
• constructing politicians with the sort of ordinary features
(Jimmy carter, reagan, Tatcher, Clinton, Bush Jr,
Howard)…The aura of specialness and ordinariness plus
familiarity mixed with hierarchal distance (Marshall,
1977).
6. • Celebrity are mysterious (we don’t know the whole
person and constantly trying to get behind the mask to
discover the real person).
• Celebrity are nothing but ourselves in magnifying glasses
(Boorstin)
• Celebrities can become pseudo heroes for their followers
–role model the masses turn to for solutions to life’s
problem.
• Celebrity: reduce information overload, social complexity
to simple moral codes (understood humanized
messages, simply binary opposition)
• Provide the masses with endless supply material for
gossip
7. Role of spin team Role of politicians
Research target audiences to
find what sort of personality is
appealing
Analyze target constituency and work with
spin doctors to understand the target
groups
Script a personality that appeals
to target audiences
Help to construct the scripts; understand
and internalized the scripts
Find and/or create a “face” Work at building & maintaining an
appropiate “face & persona”…BUILDING
PROFILE
Develop pseudo events Develop fantasy relationship with
audiences….turn the audiences/voter into
followers
Transform issues to personalities Help followers to make sense of the world
by simplifying complex issues into slogans
and symbols
Develop myths Perform the personality that embodies the
myths
Work backstage Perform the script front stage to build
celebrity
8. Denton : Constructing Celebrity
• Develop name recognition
• Self promotion (turning one self into televised fantasy
figure the masses can identify with)
• Projecting the aura of warmth and sincerity
• Learning to substitute the “personality” for “issues”,
because….the personality are more salient and easier to
understand than issues.
• Learning to appeal to audiences by staging
performances that “reduce complexity”
