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.