Audience of One: Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America

by James Poniewozik

Overview

New York Times Book Review • Notable Book of the Year
Washington Post • 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2019
NPR.org • NPR 2019 Concierge
Slate • 10 Best Books of the Year
Chicago Tribune • Best Books of the Year
Publishers Weekly • 10 Best Books of the Year

Audience of One reframes America’s identity through the rattled mind of an insomniac, cable-news-junkie president.New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik offers a “darkly entertaining” (Carlos Lozada, Washington Post) history of mass media from the early 1980s to today, demonstrating how a volcanic, camera-hogging antihero merged with America’s most powerful medium to become our forty-fifth president. In charting the seismic evolution of television from a monolithic mass medium into today’s fractious confederation of spite-and-insult media subcultures, Poniewozik reveals how Donald Trump took advantage of these historic changes by constantly reinventing himself: from a boastful cartoon zillionaire; to 1990s self-parodic sitcom fixture; to The Apprentice reality-TV star; and finally to Twitter-mad, culture-warring demagogue. Already lauded as a “brilliant and daring” (Annalisa Quinn, NPR) work that defines a generation, Audience of One emerges as a classic in cultural criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631498152
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	529,865
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

James Poniewozik has been the chief television critic of the New York Times since 2015. He was previously the television and media critic for Time magazine and media columnist for Salon. He lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part I Origin Story

Episode 1 Unreal Estate 3

Episode 2 The Least Objectionable Program 21

Episode 3 Monopoly 37

Episode 4 As Himself 60

Part II Antihero

Episode 5 The Dark Side 85

Episode 6 Money Money Money Money! 107

Episode 7 The Paranoid Style in America's Newsroom 142

Episode 8 The Most Objectionable Program 173

Part III President Television

Episode 9 Red Light 195

Episode 10 The Gorilla Channel 236

Finale The Idea of a President 269

Acknowledgments 283

Notes 285

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

"The Mueller Report of television criticism! James Poniewozik’s Audience of One is both damning and illuminating, a witty, penetrating exposé of Trump’s most intimate relationship, the one with the medium that made him."

Emily Nussbaum