From the book's jacket copy:
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.The hour+ discussion covers that full story. Trump used his early real-estate career to become known in local and regional media. From there he went national and made himself into the paradigmatic contemporary example of a modern business tycoon and, in turn, used the reputation radiating from that image to pull himself out of business reverses. By the time The Apprentice came to a close he had become a creature of the media. The smooth operator of his earliest TV appearances had become the crude opportunistic populist firebrand whose campaign rallies where such good TV that cable channels were happy to broadcast them to take up airtime.
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.
