Coping with a Crisis of Meaning: Televised Paranoia

Abstract

We live in a culture highly sensitised to its own perceived vulnerability which is socially constructed through dominant, mainstream representations, in particular, broadcast television and national presses. Across all genres, television communicates a host of perceived dangers or risks to human survival as entertainment, responding and reproducing the victim or risk consciousness (Furedi, 2005 [1997]) of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Terrorism has captured the imaginations of not only politicians but also producer/writers, and, as a consequence of this and the visual spectacle that war and terrorism provide, it has featured regularly and consistently in British and American television programming since the late 1990s.KeywordsCamera MovementPolitical EliteConspiracy TheoryTerrorist ThreatDirty BombThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.