Title: Audience of One Pdf Television, Donald Trump, and the Politics of Illusion
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 20th 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 television 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 shape-shifted into a boastful tabloid playboy in the 1980s; a self-parodic sitcom fixture in the 1990s; a reality-TV "You're Fired" machine in the 2000s; and finally, the biggest role of his career, a Fox News-obsessed, Twitter-mad, culture-warring demagogue in the White House.
Follows the media created president from infancy to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I clearly remember the afternoon in the late-80’s when I closed the back cover of the book The Art Of The Deal and said aloud “Donald Trump is the most reprehensible person I’ve ever read about. In his book Audience of One, author James Poniewozik explains why I was correct and a little ahead of the curve. The book is laid out in an episodic format, much like a TV show you stream on your devices. This is fitting as Donald was born in 1946 and shared his infancy with the new media of television. His mother was enraptured with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth while at about the same time a rematch between Joe Lewis and Billy Conn was televised live from Yankee stadium. And so the author weaves the readers through the inter-connectness of the infant Trump as he grows into the media created mogul that ends up in the White House.Episode 1 – the early years. Donald Trump decides to go into real estate as opposed to the movie biz. Chronicling an early interview with a society reporter dazzled by his appeal she reported of his chauffeured limo (daddy’s), his net worth (daddy’s), his first-in-class at Wharton (later debunked), his Swedish ancestry (actually German and Scottish), and the fact that he’s publicity shy (eye roll).Episode 2 – Least Objectionable Program. This section gives an excellent overview of the content of TV programming history here in the US and how the early years strove for content that was unobjectionable over excellent. The end of the chapter has a comparison to Rodney Dangerfield’s crass depiction of a rich, acerbic archetype in Caddyshack to the Trump character that lives and breathes in the Washington of today.Episode 3 – Monopoly - The 1980’s is when the American public spent a decade with their necks craning upwards. TV, Media and written lit gave us a wink and a nod to the common man’s wanting to be “let in”. And it was OK to be rich – just look at the Reagans in the White House. This, by the way, is the decade that Trump hooked his book “The Art of the Deal” directly on to Lee Iacocca’s autobiography whose last chapter was, incidentally, named “Making America Great Again”.I won’t go on any farther. You get the idea. There’s 12 episodes in this book that is written with a keen eye for parallels between the media of TV and political culture that took place during the life span of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The book is well written, informative, witty and sharply targeted. It’s well worth your time.Make Donald Trump Small Again James Poniewozik, the TV critic for The NY Times, describes throughout Audience of One his penchant for television shows with powerful narratives. He emphasizes the difference between twenty-four hour news channels, which are just one burst of information after another, with a well-done drama series like the Sopranos.Unsurprisingly, his first book is itself a powerful narrative. First, how TV changed from the anodyne sitcoms of the 1980s to the diverse panoply of reality TV and HBO dramas and comedies. He highlights how dramas are often about empathizing and cooperating while reality TV is about competition and ruthlessness in the drive to win.More controversially, he describes how Donald Trump has coopted the values of reality TV into winning the presidency. He paints an image of Trump as an amoral, narcissistic, pathological liar who is chosen as the champion fighter for one diminishing sector of America (the white lower and upper classes). He has brought to life the much admired strong men of Breaking Bad, the Sopranos and like entertainment.Trump, according to Poniewozik, sees the presidency as essentially like an episode of Survivor. Get the goods for America against all other nations and America’s goods for his electorate.I found only two problems with this narrative. One is it is only a narrative. If it resonates with your experience of American culture then you’ll agree with it. But there’s really no way to prove or disprove any of its points.Second, it paints such an overwhelmingly negative portrait of Trump and his supporters that it will probably be read only by like minded liberals.Personally, I came away with the sense that Poniewozik has an important story to tell. But I’m sure that critics will try to find holes in his narrative structure.Moreover, while I thought that this is a book that every politically-conscious person should read I have to hope I’m wrong that the condescending tone toward MAGAs will restrict its ambit to coastal liberal elites. If you are broadminded enough to consider a rather partisan narrative this book is highly recommended.
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