GIna Chick, David Genat, Guy Sebastian, Poh Ling Yeow, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don’t have much in common – except that they are the living incarnation of the essential truth of reality TV: there can only be one winner.
Gina, David, Guy, Poh and countless others have transformed their success in survival, dance, cooking and song into brilliant careers probably beyond their wildest dreams.
Donald Trump applied the same determination to become the most powerful man in the world. For more than a decade, he was in the Millions of Americans most of the weeks, choosing winners, barking his judgment. Viewers have not seen the squadrons of producers, camera operators, sounds of sounds, make -up artists, fixers and false. The truth prevails about honesty because most of us understand the concept of precision.
At the age of almost 80, DJT instinctively absorbed television lessons all his life. While others have struggled to give meaning to the theory of the scientist of communications Marshall McLuhan that “the medium is the message”, he lived it. He tried to be an influencer before the term was invented; He was and continues to be, the Ultimate product placement. The sneers of others have fed him.
For all speeches on the power of social media, Elon Musk, has learned at its expense that, although its platform is ideal for proclamations, self-promotion and advertising, its narrative still does not correspond to the rooted habits of the television narration. “I regret some of my articles on the president @realdonaldtrump last week. They went too far,” he posted, waving a white flag on X.
Meanwhile, the rest of us hosted our Sagely head, we knew that it would happen, would pass the popcorn, enjoy the show.
Except that it is not a program, even if the logic of television that we have all grown with us encourages to think. Man in his center has the ability, literally, to destroy the world.
This fact that undoubtedly lingered in the minds of other world leaders when he generally left the G7 Canadian summit last week. He Quickly slap the French president, Emmanuel MacronWho with a typical franchise suggested that the president had left peace in the Middle East.
Like All Stars, DJT also has a huge charming capacity. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor -in -chief of the Atlantic who made enormous (temporary) damage to the new regime when he revealed that it was included in a group cat classified on signal organized by Mike Waltz, who shortly after ceased to be the president’s national security advisor. Goldberg describes a later meeting in the golden oval office: “What I found during this particular meeting was a Trump who was discreet, attentive and eager to convince us that he is good in his work and good for the country. It is not easy to escape the tractor beam from his charisma, but in one way or another, we have succeeded.”
While a young DJT absorbed the lessons of the age of television to Midtown Manhattan, at 50 pâtés of South houses, Neil Postman, a brilliant scholar at New York University, feared where this new manufactured reality could lead. In his scholarly treaty, but entitled, having fun to death, Postman described the way in which television methods had been transformed and, in his mind, the public sphere. Entertainment and emotion prevail; The worst trends of human nature presented themselves; The truth is enough.
Postman had little objection to television as entertainment, what worried him was when these methods and rituals were also adopted in news and current affairs, in serious programs that provide information that clarifies major decisions. As we will say now, the nuances and complexity are lost.
He turned repeatedly to Aldous Huxley to understand what he feared. “He was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people of the new courageous world was not that they laughed instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they laughed and why they had stopped thinking.”
We are the poorest not to know what the factor would do at that moment. He died a year before the first season of the apprentice was broadcast in 2004, with “decent notes and mocking journals”. DJT took a 21 -storey elevator to the alleged conference room on the fourth floor of the Trump Tower, where the candidates who had been set to save his failing companies awaited his judgment.
As Emily Nussbaum documents it in the sun, at that time, no one understood how he would use the platform as a springboard to his greater ambition. When he did, one of the first apprentices urged voters to watch beyond the artifice of television and to recognize the risk.
Celebrity has been transformed into a vocation. The real world a B-Roll backdrop.
Australian networks quickly adopted the formats of reality TV, creating in the process some of the best of its kind. Our housewives … are considered to be among the largest, and alone has restored a feeling of lost authenticity.
Despite the dance with Pauline Hanson with the stars, there is always a line between public life and entertainment. But it becomes more vague, because requests for the research of the attention of the contemporary online media environment reward foam and emotion more than substance. It is more important than ever to preserve this distinction between true and make believe.