Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (New Security Challenges)

The advent of the twenty-first century was marked by a succession of conflicts and catastrophes that demanded unrestrained journalism. Hoskins and O'Loughlin demonstrate that television, tarnished by its economy of liveness and its impositions of immediacy, and brevity, fails to deliver critical and consistent expositions of our conflicting times. Television is a medium of terror. Stories and images of mostly distant violence and bloodshed are streamed continuously into our homes, penetrating our senses of personal and collective safety. And yet the journalism of terror is also the journalism of security. Television, as it delivers daily the spectre of endless terror and violence, also rescues us from the brink of chaos. The unimaginable is rendered familiar and terror is harnessed in the frames, rituals, and routines of the major medium of our age. Hoskins and O'Loughlin demonstrate the power of the entanglement of television and terror in both the spinning and the containing of the discourses of insecurity that mark our mediatized experience of the twenty-first century Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction....Pages 1-21 Television and Time....Pages 22-52 Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of the ‘CNN Effect’....Pages 53-73 Talking Terror: Political Discourses and the 2003 Iraq War....Pages 74-98 Television’s Quagmire: The Misremembered and the Unforgotten....Pages 99-117 The Distant Body....Pages 118-138 Drama and Documentary: The Power of Nightmares....Pages 139-160 Security and Publics: Democratic Times?....Pages 161-186 The Irresolution of Television....Pages 187-192 Back Matter....Pages 193-217 In this book, Hoskins and O'Loughlin demonstrate that television, tarnished by its economy of liveness and its default impositions of immediacy, brevity and simultaneity, fails to deliver a critical and consistent exposition adequate to our conflicting times