Stewart Myrent
Just finished another new release, "Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America", by James Poniewozik, chief television critic of the NY Times. This is one of the most fascinating books I have read. I would recommend this book to everyone. If you struggle to understand Trump's actions, or words, you will have a way better understanding of his psyche, & even if you already feel that you understand Trump's actions/deeds/words, I would still recommend reading it. Trump is the same age as we (although he is slightly older than I) & he grew up in the age of television, as did we. But, he didn't turn out as we did. Why? If you want to find out, read the book. I want to apologize upfront about the length of this post, but I am recounting some of the most salient portions. To wit: from Episode 2, "The Least Objectionable Program", "The mid-twentieth century mass-media took a country of regional cultures, dialects, and art forms and introduced a monoculture. At the same time that the Interstate Highway System was bypassing local byways and national chains were selling the same goods and fast food coast to coast, TV gave us national news, national amusements, and national obsessions. There was even a national voice, in the mid-Atlantic neutral-speak of TV hosts and anchors." And, "The ideal TV show of the time was what Paul L. Klein, an audience-measurement executive at NBC, referred to in 'TV Guide' as the 'Least Objectionable Program', or charmingly, the LOP. The LOP was a kind of programming whose chief goal was negative: 'Never give the viewer a reason to change the channel.' It was fine if a show was unexceptional as long as it was unexceptionable." In other words, entertainment that would appeal to the largest mass (%) of the mass culture. A major portion of this chapter is devoted to the fact that until about 1980, television was controlled in every aspect: news, sports & entertainment, by the 3 major networks, but after 1980, cable & satellite exploded. "In 1980, according to Nielsen, about 20% of American TV households had cable or satellite TV, by the end of the century it was 76%." And because of the plethora of channels, the viewing public became more fragmented. From Episode 3, "Monopoly": "Trump's early 80s TV appearances offered a soft-spoken version of his later, bellicose reality-TV character. He created a version of his aspirational self that the mass audience would accept. They would accept greedy and competitive if it was insouciant and entertaining. They would accept ostentation and arrogance if you put on a show, with a half-grin that told them you understood that it was a show. They would accept extravagance and self-indulgence if you let them share it vicariously. They'd laugh off boasting and lying if you telegraphed that you were a rascal, because that let them tell themselves they were smart enough to get the joke." From Episode 4, "As Himself": "But if you believe that he was primarily a celebrity who leveraged his fame into business, then the 1990s were a defining period of his career - maybe more so than the 1980s. In the 1980s, Donald Trump was a businessman who used celebrity as a helpful promotional device. By the 1990s, he was a celebrity whose calling card was the ability to play the figure of a businessman. He would leverage that performance - the self as a character, wearing the Halloween costume of a mogul - to make himself a reality-TV star in the 2000s and a politician in the 2010s. And the 1990s were when playing 'Donald Trump' became his full-time job." From Episode 5, "The Dark Side", talking about a drama series that debuted on Fox network in 04/96, called "Profit", about a shameless (& psychopathic) businessman, but noting that it did not become a big hit: " 'Profit' was canceled after 4 airings. America was not ready for an amoral, damaged businessman whose shamelessness made him powerful and whose psyche was formed by television. Yet." In Episode 6, "Money Money Money Money", talking about reality TV shows, "The stakes in these shows were not life and death. But their philosophy vibed with a certain sharp-elbowed spirit of the age. It's a cutthroat, zero-sum world they said. For you to win, someone has to lose, and when someone else gains, it's at your expense. Maybe you have to cheat and lie, but aren't you doing it for the right reasons? To feed your kids? To achieve your dreams? To find someone to love? Then get out there and do what you've got to do. Sometimes you have to work the dark side." And talking about "Survivor", "...which premiered on CBS in May 2000...The first season's master of the 'social game' was corporate consultant Richard Hatch, who would become the first of many reality-TV antiheroes. He was openly gay - a rarity on network TV in 2000 - and he stood out early on for his habit of striding around the beach naked. His torso pale and fleshy, his nethers pixellated for prime time. But above all he was first to crack the idea that the key to this game was not wilderness skills but shamelessness and the will to flout social norms: to lie, to make alliances and break them, to convince people that it's in their interest to hold their nose and work with you until you no longer needed them. In the finale, his vanquished opponents awarded him the million bucks in spite of this, or rather because of it. They recognized that he outplayed them." And, "The author Fran Lebowitz would later say that Trump was 'a poor person's idea of a rich person.' But that's exactly what reality TV is about. 'The Bachelor' is a lonely person's idea of love. 'Survivor' is a shut-in's idea of nature. 'The Apprentice' didn't need a businessman. It needed the idea of a businessman. That was Donald Trump. It was the entire point of him. He spent a lifetime in symbiosis with television, adopting its mtabolism, learning to feed its appetites. Now, finally, he would merge with it." "His catchphrase, that curt 'You're fired', combined the ethos of reality TV and Trump's mythmaking as the man with the golden gut who cut through the crap in his drive to have the best. Maybe it wasn't nice, maybe he weasn't nice, but then, success wasn't nice. Was being nice going to get you a job in the miserable post-9/11 economy? Were we going to whip al-Queda's asses by being nice? No, we had to choose. With every firing, the show's premise told us, we got closer to perfection, closer to Trump." And, "All the theatrical power of TV is invested in making one aging man look desirable, one skinflint look generous, one lucky rich boy look self-made, one checkered business career look flawless, one accumulation of set dressing look like reality." From Episode 7, "The Paranoid Style in America's Newsroom", "The fragmentation of the audience had happened. The embrace of the antihero had happened. All of this happened in the world of celebrity, where Donald Trump began playing the character of rakish billionaire playboy, evolved into the caustic You're Fired Guy. It happened as well in the world of politics into which he had spun off that character. This meant that, maybe, where a presidential candidate once had to make a majority comfortable, he could now discomfit an intense enough minority to carry him over one rival, then another, and take their followers with him." From Episode 8, "The Most Objectionable Program", talking about Twitter, "It was one microburst after another, a fire hose of non sequiturs. If TV news was 'Now...this', Twitter was 'thisthisthisthis'. It was the perfect expressive medium for someone with a minimal attention span who got mad a lot. It had endless potential for someone who could communicate both as a celebrity (playing yourself as a character) and as a demogogue (in emotions and ALL CAPS). And along with Facebook, it made easier to do what Fox News et al. did: create a virtual chamber in which everyone thought like you and raised your voices, together, in the communal hymn of Getting Mad on the Internet." From Episode 9, "Red Light": Talking about Trump's political rallies in 2016, "Journalists at the rallies described attendees who were civil and polite outside the venue, cheerful, chatty, like they were out for a night at a theater or a concert. Which they were; Trump's crowds often described the rallies, foremost, as entertainment, a good time. They were used to feeling left out by Hollywood liberals, whom the commentators on Fox News always said should keep their politics to themselves. But now here was a big star, a genuine TV celebrity, who was on their side, and they loved it. They couldn't wait for the free show...Trump knew what wound them up; he would later tell his staff that the crowd would roar when he recited the names of Hispanic criminals, making up some names to prove his point." "The Trump fans were seeing, on stage, what they'd seen on reality shows and Fox News: anger as entertainment. They were seeing TV, personified." And, "Trump's campaign ran on reality-TV morality, which deflected conventional attacks of dishonesty (It makes me smart!) and impropriety (I know the crooked system!) and flip-flopping (I did what I had to do!) When he was called out for hypocrisy - such as giving money to the politicians he now disdained - he owned it as shrewdness. This argument was Richard Hatch in the first 'Survivor' finale: 'Like me or not, you've got to admire how I played the game.' It substituted brazenness for truthfulness. So it didn't hurt Trump that he lied. A lot. Blatantly and obviously...'He says what he means', his supporters said, which did not mean, 'He tells the truth'. It meant he did not consider whether his words were kind or responsible or pleasing - or true - but simply whether he wanted to say them. That was 'being real', which was better than being honest, more liberating than being tethered to fact. When he said he saw thousands of Muslims cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center in Jersey City (it never happened) or tweeted a claim that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks (it was 15 percent) - well, he was right about their 'feeling', that a chaotic brown tide was washing over the world." And from Episode 10, "The Gorilla Channel": "So imagine it. You have been consumed by fame all your life. You grew up with TV. You wanted to get on TV, so you did. You prefer TV to reading. And you prefer TV about you to anything else. You absolutely burn to know what is being said about you at all times. Now you live in a time when TV is more readily available than tap water." "The news is a TV show, 24 hours a day on multiple channels, in which the president is always the star. You have laways thought that you were the most important person in any room, and now you actually are, and there are talking rectangles affixed to every surface in sight to remind you of it." And, "At a press conference, Trump insisted that he had separated himself from his private businesses by pointing to a table stacked with manila folders and papers, not unlike the 'Trump steaks' (which he had stopped marketing years earlier) at his campaign press conference. Staffers blocked reporters from examining them. They may or have not have had printing on them. But like the props on a reality show, they conveyed a visual concept: 'Documentation' " And, "Trump had always fudged his facts. He got the tabloids to call him a 'Billionaire' when he wasn't one; he added ten phantom stories to Trump Tower and his buyers were glad to agree on the fiction. He called the practice 'truthful hyperbole'." And, " 'Enemy of the People' put the press in a double bind. On the one hand, it framed themas the opposing team from Trump which invited his supporters to disregard any bad news accordingly." Finally, from "Finale": "Idea of a President", "But there's an entire realm of television that has been mostly outside the scope of this book because it's mostly outside the scope of Trump's life. This is the TV that, like novels, films, and theater, explores the lives of other people, on the premise that there is value in understanding people other than you besides learning how to beat them." Talking about other popular TV shows, "They argued for the idea that you could accomplish more working with people than against them, that another person's gain did not mean your loss." Sorry to run on so long, but I really enjoyed this book. One more thing. Janis, thanks for pointing out to "Fall back" this past weekend. I though it was next weekend, bur I did adjust my clocks this past Saturday night.
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