Audience of One Television, Donald Trump, and the Politics of Illusion

James Poniewozik, Matthew Josdal

eAudio - 2019

An incisive cultural history that captures a fractious nation through the prism of television and the rattled mind of a celebrity president In the tradition of Neil Postman's masterpiece Amusing Ourselves to Death, Audience of One shows how American media have shaped American society and politics, by interweaving two crucial stories. The first story follows the evolution of television from the three-network era of the twentieth century, which joined millions of Americans in a shared monoculture, into today's zillion-channel, Internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is a cultural critique of Donald Trump. Reaching back to the 1940s, when Trump and commercial tel...evision were born, Poniewozik illustrates how Donald became "a character that wrote itself, a brand mascot that jumped off the cereal box and entered the world, a simulacrum that replaced the thing it represented." Viscerally attuned to the media, Trump... more