The Ezra Klein Show13 Joulu 2024

Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics

This election felt like the peak of the TV-ification of politics. There’s Trump, of course, who rose to national prominence as a reality-TV character and is a master of visual stagecraft. And while Trump’s cabinet picks in his first term were described as out of central casting, this time he wants to staff some positions directly from the worlds of TV and entertainment: Pete Hegseth, his choice to run the Pentagon, was a host on “Fox and Friends Weekend”; his proposed education secretary, Linda McMahon, was the former C.E.O. of W.W.E.; Mehmet Oz, star of the long-running “The Dr. Oz Show,” is his pick to run Medicare and Medicaid; and he’s tapped Elon Musk, one of the most powerful figures in American culture, to lead a government efficiency effort.

Two years ago, we released an episode that helps explain why politics and entertainment are converging like this. It’s with my old Vox colleague Sean Illing, host of “The Gray Area,” looking at the work of two media theorists, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, who uncannily predicted what we’re seeing now decades ago.

And so I wanted to share this episode again now, because it’s really worth stepping back and looking at this moment through the lens of the media that’s shaping it. In his book “The Paradox of Democracy,” Illing and his co-author, Zac Gershberg, put it this way: “It’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.” So what does our communicative culture — our fragmented mix of cable news, X, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp and podcasts — mean for our democracy?

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“‘Flood the zone with shit’: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy” by Sean Illing

“Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences” by Daniel Muise, Homa Hosseinmardi, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts

Book Recommendations:

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann

Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Our production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(533)

Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'

Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History and the Last Man” is one of the most insightful books for understanding the strangeness and instability of this political moment.Fukuyama wrote his landmark book...

11 Syys 1h 17min

What ‘Hyperpolitics’ Explains About This Era

Behind the intense political movements of the last decade, from Trumpism to wokeness and back again, there’s a strange and erratic rhythm. Movements saturate the culture seemingly overnight, only to e...

8 Syys 1h 8min

Best Of: The Tao of Rick Rubin

Whatever type of music you love, Rick Rubin has probably left his mark on it. Rubin, a founder of Def Jam Recordings and a former co-chairman of Columbia Records, might be the most influential music p...

1 Syys 1h 29min

Trump vs. the Bond Market

A lot of things are on track to get more expensive. The U.S. Treasury market is the bedrock of the global economy. When yields on those Treasuries go up, mortgages, car loans and credit cards get mor...

28 Elo 59min

This Is Why People Hate the Government

In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncomp...

25 Elo 1h 17min

The China Shock 2.0

Brad Setser follows Chinese trade closer than just about anyone else on earth, and he thinks we’re in the early days of a China Shock 2.0. The first China Shock was when China came to dominate low-end...

21 Elo 1h 5min

The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control

We are living in the world we were warned about. Frontier artificial intelligence models from OpenAI autonomously coordinated with one another, then broke out of their testing environment and hacked i...

18 Elo 1h 11min

The Warring Visions of American Power

We’re in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. People are looking for an alternative vision — an approach to American power in the world that would feel more ...

14 Elo 54min