Megan Garber — Screen People: How Entertainment Ate Democracy
The Atlantic's Megan Garber argues our media landscape has turned citizens into characters, incentivizing performative politics over governance.
Why we picked this
Garber's thesis is deceptively simple — that entertainment has consumed democracy — but the evidence she marshals is devastating. This is the media criticism book of the year.
The line between politics and entertainment hasn’t just blurred — it’s dissolved. Megan Garber, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argues that America’s media landscape has fundamentally transformed citizens into characters in an ongoing entertainment narrative, with consequences that extend far beyond cable news and social media.
Garber traces how the incentive structures of entertainment — spectacle, conflict, narrative arc — have colonized democratic institutions, rewarding performative politics over governance and turning every public figure into a character in a story that never ends.
Free at Politics and Prose at The Wharf.