Hot Type: Fascism Through a Lens

Heidi Siegmund Cuda on how Trump is using television to manipulate Americans into a new authoritarian reality

Fifty years ago, a film called Network predicted that America would crack. When people started believing lies, their lives would become an illusion and only the lies would become real.

The film documents a newsroom that has become a reality show, after an anchorman has a psychotic breakdown live on prime time TV. The ratings are so good that the anchor, Howard Beale, gets his own nightly show where he rages against the TV machine:

“You're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell… We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal… This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!”

He pleads with the audience to turn off the TV.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Americans didn’t turn off the TV and the illusions became stronger. So strong, that Donald Trump — a bankrupt casino owner bailed out repeatedly by the Russian mob — re-emerged from his losses with a contract to star in an NBC ‘reality show’ called The Apprentice where even the producers knew he was a fake rich guy, giving him the training he needed to deftly manipulate large swaths of the population into believing his lies and doubting their own reality.

And the media as a whole has never quite figured out how to cover him ever since.