Imag­ine a Char­lie Sheen guide to sobri­ety. Or a Bernie Mad­off hand­book for risk-free invest­ing. CNN’s Unprece­dent­ed: The Elec­tion That Changed Every­thing, the first ins­ta-book pur­port­ing to defin­i­tive­ly inter­pret the 2016 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, pos­es pret­ty much the same paradox.

Two-dimensional stereotyping aside, the CNN-branded view of the res publica is a place where things just mysteriously happen.

Yes, that’s right: Jeff Zucker’s CNN — which cruised to his­toric, and his­tor­i­cal­ly prof­itable, rat­ings with its Trump­packed 2016 cam­paign cov­er­age; which broad­cast acres of unfil­tered Trump ral­ly footage in what amount­ed to a lav­ish in-kind cam­paign dona­tion; which retained Trump cam­paign oper­a­tive Corey Lewandows­ki as an on-air news ana­lyst (there­by per­ma­nent­ly degrad­ing the mean­ing of both ​“news” and ​“analy­sis”) — is now game­ly step­ping for­ward to explain just how it was that an author­i­tar­i­an, dem­a­gog­ic big­ot with a long record of sex­u­al pre­da­tion won the U.S. pres­i­den­cy. The true won­der­ment here is that the text isn’t just the old bully’s admo­ni­tion to ​“stop hit­ting your­self,” repeat­ed in dif­fer­ent fonts and type­faces across the cof­fee-table volume’s 288 pages.

Instead, Unprece­dent­ed is gen­er­ous­ly bedecked with cam­paign pho­tos, buzz­words and scat­ter­shot pun­dit rem­i­nis­cences. As an explo­ration of the restive, angry Amer­i­can elec­torate, how­ev­er, the book is as glib and con­tent-free as a typ­i­cal cable news hour. We’re made to under­stand that a down­ward­ly mobile seg­ment of mid­dle-to-work­ing-class white vot­ers is mad about some­thing. But the clos­est we get to hear­ing them explain the source of that anger is an inter­view with a Trump-sup­port­ing South Philadel­phi­an named Jer­sey Dave Cal­abro, who dis­avowed his life­long Bruce Spring­steen fan­dom when The Boss came out for Hillary, and bold­ly pre­dict­ed Trump’s Penn­syl­va­nia vic­to­ry because ​“the guy nev­er los­es.” How con­de­scend­ing is this thumb­nail por­trait? This con­de­scend­ing: ​“He did not always drink beer,” sneers Thomas Lake, a CNN Pol­i­tics writer and the book’s author, ​“but when he did, he drank Coors Light.” Lake then air­i­ly informs us that Trump car­ried the elec­tion thanks to an ​“army of Jer­sey Dave Calabros.”

Two-dimen­sion­al stereo­typ­ing aside, the CNN-brand­ed view of the res pub­li­ca is a place where things just mys­te­ri­ous­ly hap­pen. ​“Peo­ple kept for­get­ting things, kept chang­ing their minds” is how the mid-sum­mer dis­ar­ray in the Trump cam­paign is actu­al­ly described here; ​“con­fu­sion took hold.”

You don’t say. Con­fu­sion actu­al­ly abounds when you lov­ing­ly con­struct car­i­ca­tures of a sim­pler, more home­spun elec­torate that only exists in a TV producer’s idiot rever­ies. Chron­i­cling a cam­paign sea­son burst­ing with pop­ulist resent­ment, CNN doesn’t both­er to delve into its sources, or America’s tan­gled his­to­ry of thwart­ed and divert­ed pop­ulist revolt. Instead, it gives us cloy­ing greet­ing-card appraisals of the Amer­i­can scene: ​“The sun rose and set as usu­al that fall,” we’re warm­ly assured. ​“Dogs were still loy­al, cats unknow­able, and chil­dren even­tu­al­ly fell asleep.”

The Sanders upris­ing is treat­ed with dis­mis­sive scorn: ​“Sanders had to lose in order to be proven right,” Lake non­sen­si­cal­ly pro­nounces. ​“If the bil­lion­aires were as pow­er­ful and cor­rupt as he claimed, they would nev­er let Sanders become pres­i­dent.” Nev­er mind that the Clin­ton cam­paign and its DNC retain­ers hard­wired the pri­maries to fend off the Sanders cru­sade, along with any oth­er seri­ous chal­lenge to Clinton’s coronation.

One deci­sive take­away from all the blath­er­skite col­lect­ed between the cov­ers of Unprece­dent­ed is that you, dear read­er, should not even think of blam­ing the tire­less­ly vac­u­ous and amoral busi­ness mod­el of CNN for the many per­ils now assail­ing the Amer­i­can repub­lic. CNN Pres­i­dent Jeff Zuck­er — the man who, in his pri­or post at NBC, cat­a­pult­ed Trump to glob­al celebri­ty with The Appren­tice—con­tributes a self-excul­pat­ing chap­ter laud­ing his own exec­u­tive vision in com­pre­hend­ing ​“that Trump had much broad­er appeal” than many media naysay­ers pre­sumed. Scrubbed of the smarmy self-con­grat­u­la­tion, this boils down to lit­tle more than the stan­dard hack-exec­u­tive ali­bi of ​“giv­ing the peo­ple what they want” — with­out ever paus­ing to acknowl­edge that your own sat­u­ra­tion cov­er­age direct­ly shapes what peo­ple think they want. But hey, Zuck­er chirps, CNN could be hard on Trump as well. Dur­ing one CNN pri­ma­ry debate, anchor Jake Tap­per invit­ed Mar­co Rubio and Ted Cruz to attack Trump’s qual­i­fi­ca­tions to han­dle the nuclear codes, and ​“both took a pass.” So presto: a clean fourth-estate bill of health! ​“His com­peti­tors took a pass,” Zuck­er insists. ​“How is that the fault of the media?”

Well, like this, Jeff: No coher­ent def­i­n­i­tion of the media’s role in our democ­ra­cy includes debate mod­er­a­tors putting ques­tions to an author­i­tar­i­an thug’s ​“com­peti­tors” and then fad­ing obse­quious­ly into the back­ground. Going back to John Peter Zenger and Eli­jah Parish Love­joy, Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists have risked impris­on­ment and mar­tyr­dom to chal­lenge unjust exer­cis­es of state pow­er. Imag­ine if Ed Mur­row had asked some of Joe McCarthy’s Sen­ate col­leagues to have at the lying dem­a­gogue, and when they failed, sim­ply end­ed his CBS broad­casts with a fatal­is­tic shrug.

As Don­ald Trump pre­pares to become the most pow­er­ful man on the plan­et, he’s let it be known that he intends to harass and threat­en hon­est jour­nal­ists into a pos­ture of uncrit­i­cal def­er­ence. In that sense, and in that sense alone, Unprece­dent­ed is use­ful — as a snap­shot of how low jour­nal­ism can sink in the Trump age.