Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow and Joe Lockhart.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Have power and words have consequences.

Our guest today is the Chief Television Critic for the New York Times.

He often focuses on the intersection of television, politics and culture.

He's the author of the new book, Audience of One, Donald Trump, Television and the fracturing

of America.

James Ponywozic, welcome to Words Matter.

Thanks so much for having me.

So every week, one of the questions we try to answer is how did we get here?

And I have to say, your book offers some of the most insightful, most coherent and most

logical answers to that question.

And in the process that explains what's happening in real time and why.

And you start out by saying that it's really two parallel stories going on here.

One is about television and the other is about Donald Trump.

And they were both really born at the same time.

So let's start with television.

How did television go from a media monolith, as you describe it, to the media bubbles we have today,

or more precisely from the great homogenizer of the 20th century to the great

fragmenter of the 21st?

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