An incisive social history that catches a fractious nation through the prism of tv as well as 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 comes after the development of television through the three-network era from the twentieth hundred years, which joined millions of Americans in a shared about Audience of 1: Tv, Donald Trump, and the Politics of Illusion monoculture, into today’s zillion-channel, Internet-atomized universe, which sliced up and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures. The second story is usually a social critique of Donald Trump.

Reaching back to the 1940s, when Trump and commercial tv were blessed, Poniewozik illustrates how Donald became ‘a personality that composed itself, a brand mascot that jumped off the cereal box and joined the world, a simulacrum that replaced the thing it symbolized.’ Viscerally attuned towards the mass media, Trump shape-shifted into a boastful tabloid playboy in the 1980s; a self-parodic sitcom fixture in the 1990s; a reality-TV ‘You’re Terminated’ machine in the 2000s; and finally, the biggest part of his career, a Fox News-obsessed, Twitter-mad, culture-warring demagogue in the White House.