Audience Of One

James Poniewozik

"A generational work that, using television, reframes America's identity through the rattled mind of a septuagenarian, insomniac, cable-news-junkie president. In the tradition of great cultural figures like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik traces the history of television and mass media from the early 1980s to today, and demonstrates how a "volcanic, camera- hogging antihero" merged with America's most powerful medium to become our forty-fifth president. Beginning where Postman left off, Audience of One weaves together two compelling stories. The first charts the seismic evolution of television from a monolithic mass medium, with three mainstream networks, into today's fractious confederation of "spite-and-insult" media subcultures. The second examines Donald Trump himself, who took advantage of these historic changes to...