Fictional TV dramas displaced public debate over real government policy

Evidence

This chapter explores this slippery realm between representations and their potential impacts. Through each facet of this discussion, what arises is a fact that is utterly taken for granted: television mediates the War on Terror. Between 2001 and 2009 the fictional creations of a tiny number of artists and executives shaped the ways that viewer-citizens engaged with the very real war going on around us. As indicated in the opening epigraph, the journalist Peter Carlson thinks that it is ridiculous that a TV drama, rather than the U.S. government, was criticized for its role in torture (and for its representation at that). Whether ridiculous or not, the journalist Kelly Greenhill asserts that it is important to take seriously the power of TV dramas to shape public perceptions of the War on Terror. Throughout the Bush years, TV shows became a crucial way that Americans saw, thought about, and talked about the United States in a state of emergency after 9/11. Public debate, it sometimes seemed, was displaced onto TV dramas. The slippage between debating a television show and debating a government’s policies and practices demonstrates the significance of TV dramas during the War on Terror. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 129

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my notes on media shaping public perception in the 24/torture debate and to the ‘media as gatekeeper’ thread across my knowledge base.
• DEFINE: Sets up the book’s core thesis: TV as mediator of the War on Terror for citizen-viewers.