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

No single book about the media more thoroughly captured the imagination of readers and critics in 2019 than Audience of One. ?Funny, acerbic and observant? (Gary Shteyngart, New York Times Book Review), 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.