How Stewart Made Tucker

Even for those of us who lived through it, it is difficult to remember or explain what postwar America’s mega-saturated media monoculture was like, and how dramatic the shift away from it has been. In the Nineties, the American mind was drenched in carefully constructed corporate messaging conveyed by a never-ending torrent of ephemeral media — countless TV channels, newspapers, magazines, and radio shows. Catchphrases, brand logos, product placement, and celebrity gossip were the psychic detritus. We were all swimming in it, and it was about nothing, nothing except itself.