Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Television has entertained America, television has ensorcelled America, and with the election of Donald J. Trump, television has conquered America. In Audience of One, New York Times chief television critic James Poniewozik traces the history of TV and mass media from the Reagan era to today, explaining how a volcanic, camera-hogging antihero merged with America's most powerful medium to become our forty-fifth 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, the chameleonic celebrity who courted fame, achieved a mind-meld with the media beast, and rode it to ultimate power.

Braiding together these disparate threads, Poniewozik combines a cultural history of modern America with a revelatory portrait of the most public American who has ever lived. 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.

Poniewozik deconstructs the chaotic Age of Trump as the 24-hour TV production that it is, decoding an era when politics has become pop culture, and vice versa. Trenchant and often slyly hilarious, Audience of One is a penetrating and sobering review of the raucous, raging, farcical reality show--performed for the benefit of an insomniac, cable-news-junkie "audience of one"--that we all came to live in, whether we liked it or not.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. xi)
• Part I Origin Story
• Episode 1 Unreal Estate (p. 3)
• Episode 2 The Least Objectionable Program (p. 21)
• Episode 3 Monopoly (p. 37)
• Episode 4 As Himself (p. 60)
• Part II Antihero
• Episode 5 The Dark Side (p. 85)
• Episode 6 Money Money Money Money! (p. 107)
• Episode 7 The Paranoid Style in America's Newsroom (p. 142)
• Episode 8 The Most Objectionable Program (p. 173)
• Part III President Television
• Episode 9 Red Light (p. 195)
• Episode 10 The Gorilla Channel (p. 236)
• Finale the Idea of a President (p. 269)
• Acknowledgments (p. 283)
• Notes (p. 285)
• Index (p. 311)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In his first book, New York Times chief television critic Poniewozik turns his eye to an exploration of Donald Trump's symbiotic relationship with television, including how it became an essential part of his career. The book mimics television--organized into three parts divided into episodes with Trump as the main character. Documenting the fragmentation of the media during Trump's coming-of-age, Poniewozik shows how central TV was to the president's life, and how he's used it to brand and develop his political career. The author further argues that reality television blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction and claims that the reality show The Apprentice influenced Trump's sense of reality, which in turn shaped his campaign and presidency and how the media could not resist covering him. VERDICT Poniewozik's well-argued work advances the investigations in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and is an important reminder of the media's influence on society. [See Prepub Alert, 2/24/19.]--Judy Solberg, Sacramento, CA

Publishers Weekly Review

Epochal shifts in entertainment media have driven the derangement of American politics, according to this caustic, scintillating cultural history. New York Times television critic Poniewozik sets Donald Trump's political rise against American television's evolution, from a three-network monopoly broadcasting inoffensive, common denominator fare to a fragmented cable and internet spectrum of isolated niche channels, a world where liberals watched Mad Men while conservatives watched Duck Dynasty. That polarization, he argues, bred new televisual genres that incubated the Trumpian worldview: antihero dramas where ugly violence is needed to defeat even darker forces, reality shows where life is a cutthroat, zero-sum struggle between amoral operators, and cable news shows that portray the world as a chaos of noisy, flashy dogfights where perceptions of truth are dictated by tribal allegiance. Meanwhile, Trump's own media persona--"the blunt, impolite apex predator" on The Apprentice, the trash-talking bully in pro-wrestling cameos, the birther conspiracy theorist on Fox News guest spots--shaped his political style and then subsumed him entirely: Trump became "a cable news channel in human form: loud, short of attention span, and addicted to conflict," Poniewozik writes. "TV became president." Poniewozik's trenchant, brilliantly witty critique of the cultural archetypes percolating into American politics is one of the best analyses yet of the Trump era. (Sept.)

Booklist Review

Chief television critic for the New York Times, Poniewozik traces Donald Trump's rise through not only the current president's relationship with television, but also the American people's connection to TV. He bookends the story with one of Trump's first television appearances, on The Today Show with Tom Brokaw in 1980, and his 2016 election. When television only had a handful of networks, it was of utmost importance that programming had broad appeal; execs looked for the Least Objectionable Program. But as television fractured (more channels, cable, streaming), so did audiences, and programming could become niche. Poniewozik argues that this marks the rise of the antihero, a trend that maybe started with Archie Bunker but was solidified with Tony Soprano and Walter White. It also coincides with the onslaught of reality TV, including The Apprentice: Trump had found his home and his audience. This is both a fascinating look at the ways television has changed and shaped the U.S., and a compelling lens through which to look at how we got to November 8, 2016.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The chief TV critic of the New York Times sums it up: "Without TV, there's no Trump."In his stellar debut, Poniewozik demonstrates how Trump, over a period of four decades, "achieved symbiosis" with the TV medium: "Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality." As TV evolved from America's homogenizer (the three major networks) to fragmenter (cable TV), Trump "used the dominant media of the daytabloids, talk shows, reality TV, cable news, Twitterto enlarge himself, to become a brand, a star, a demagogue, and a president." Recounting how Trump, who was born in 1946, grew up with TV, the author details how he cultivated a famous image and leveraged celebrity, becoming a reality TV star in the 2000s and a politician in the 2010s. "Playing Donald Trump' became his full-time job." His telling analyses of Trump's appearances on The Apprentice, Fox Friends, and The Howard Stern Show will come as revelations to readers unfamiliar with those programs, on which Trump emerged as an antihero, known for "being real" rather than honest, in the manner of the not "conventionally likeable" people on reality TV. As Poniewozik writes, he "spent a lifetime in symbiosis with television, adopting its metabolism, learning to feed its appetites." For Trump, cable TV news, with its "constant fear and passion" and need to "agitate their viewers, not settle them," was a perfect fit. His daily tweeting is based on careful study of his most popular tweetsthose provoking "shock, insult, rage." The author chronicles Trump's actions against a deeply insightful history of vast changes in the media and popular culture during the period. TV, he writes, proved "the perfect medium for his sensibility, for picking fights, for whipping up people's hatred and fear and resentment, for taking the express lane around logic."This intelligent eye-opener belongs on the small shelf of valuable books that help explain how Trump created his base. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.