Made-for-TV Fascism: My Latest Hot Type Column in Byline Probes ‘Fascism Through A Lens’
In my Saturday Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, I expose how the Trump regime is using television to manipulate Americans into a new authoritarian reality
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I woke up a few mornings ago and in my mind I heard the following words — ‘Reality TV Fascism.’ I have been trying to solve the difficulty media faces in covering a regime that produces scripted propaganda designed to instill fear and despair, outrage and bloodlust — how to cover liars without becoming a parrot of the lie… how to defend truth when covering a regime that stages sham events to further their fascist objectives. So I reached out to Jay Rosen, Marci Shore, and David Pepper for help and here is that report in my latest Hot Type column for Byline:
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Below is an excerpt:
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.
Amplify or Ignore?
“I doubt we will ever have a simple answer to ‘amplify or ignore?’ Both can be risky,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen told Byline Supplement. “When you amplify you are in some way helping to spread. But to ignore is to risk missing some crucial boundary just breached.”
So we end up with reality TV fascism. Trump’s regime stages events to groom Americans for his very real authoritarianism.
TV cameras show up to every press event, ‘reporting’ becomes parroting propaganda, which serves to instill fear as cruel words and images are burned into the minds of viewers. Just a few examples:
Trump and his Vice President in the Oval Office with President Voldymyr Zelensky, conducting a made for TV Soviet-era show trial;
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem posing like a soccer mom in front of shirtless prisoners in El Salvador;
Trump’s ‘health’ czar Robert Kennedy Jr spreading lies about ‘aborted fetus debris’ in vaccines;
Weekend anchor turned Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth spewing “Russia hoax” rhetoric when confronted about being caught using Signal to plan military strikes.
As my podcast co-host Jim Stewartson says, the White House press room is now just a QAnon chat room, as real reporters are banned and pro-Russian stooges are given a seat to ask leading conspiracy questions.
Without television, the entire regime wouldn’t even exist — the camera is their oxygen.
“Reality television has played a key role in effacing the boundary between television and real life, an effacing that is at the center of what we could describe as a postmodern neo-fascism,” Dr. Marci Shore told Byline Supplement.
The intellectual historian and author of The Ukrainian Night said that “fascism in its 21st century ‘post-truth form’” can be described as no longer possessing “even a veneer of a coherent narrative with any internal consistency”…
She directed me to this quote from Ukrainian author Oleksandr Mykhed, written on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: “Right before our eyes, a world order is being formed in which truth as a category does not exist.”
Shore concluded that effacing of the boundary between truth and fiction is one crucial role reality television has played.
“And then there's the additional normalization of performative sadism, ritual humiliation, voyeuristic displays of cruelty,” she said.
If you view the daily staged and scripted events as performative sadism, designed to normalize the cruelty of the Trump regime’s fascist agenda, fear may recede, replaced by an image of the frightened wizard behind the curtain.
How to unplug from this and disrupt it may become clearer.
Author David Pepper, who predicted the rise of the far-right in his book Laboratories of Autocracy, told Byline Supplement: “To deal with the non-stop disinformation and willingness to lie, the media needs to use different tactics, or they simply become megaphones of that disinformation. They need to commit that they will not be channels of propaganda, which means the minute a lie is shared on their airwaves, they rebut it. And they do not move to the next question or topic until the propagandist acknowledges the lie. And if that ends the interview, so be it.”
In the 1976 film Network, things don’t end so well for Howard Beale. His ‘act’ gets stale and ratings collapse.
His show gets replaced by The Mao-Tse Tung Hour.
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The above report in an excerpt of my Hot Type column originally published Saturday in Byline Supplement, May 3, 2025.
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