Ahmadinejad, Schmadinejad

Note: This post was also published on The Huffington Post. -Ed.

You know all this coverage of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University?

Well guess what -- it’s all a bunch of baloney.

While everyone from CNN to The New York Times gets caught up in the politics of Ahmadinejad’s remarks, the real story behind the podium is how much this event – wait, pseudo-event -- is a victory for both the Columbia University and Iranian public relations teams.

That’s right: Columbia and Iran 1, U.S. Media Sources 0.

While the press debate in newsprint and over the airwaves whether homosexuals exist in Iran and the existence of the Holocaust, the real story is how Ahmadinejad’s visit to the Ivy League school is a non-event to most people and, in the words of the late Daniel J. Boorstin, a pseudo-event to the press covering it.

According to Boorstin’s definition in his highly-regarded 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, the Bollinger-Ahmadinejad prizefight met all four requirements of a fluffed-up circus of hot air, er, I mean a pseudo-event:

1) The event is not spontaneous but instead a planned event;

2) It is planted primarily for the media to report on it;

3) The reality of the situation (academic discourse?) is ambiguous;

4) It is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By this measure, our beloved news outlets shouldn’t have reported on this story at all. Do I even need to ask who reported on the presidents of Turkmenistan, Chile and Malawi who also spoke that day? No, probably not, because Geraldo Rivera was too busy asking people who were locked out of the university’s campus to shove their protest signs in the camera lens.

In just once piece of evidence of this truth, Bollinger’s heated introduction to Ahmadinejad was far more extensive and planned than his introduction for the other three aforementioned foreign heads of state. You can agree with him or not on his take on “academic discourse,” but there’s no denying that his day’s efforts got him leading stories on all the major national and regional news outlets all day.

So who really wins in this scenario? Certainly not the protestors, journalists or average Joe America. But investors in Iran and Columbia trustees? Start rejoicing. That’s coverage that money can’t buy.