Fictional TV frames delegitimize legitimate political dissent as madness

Evidence

Landon’s criticisms of the United States—for killing children in Afghanistan during the War on Terror, for imprisoning innocent Muslims at Guantánamo Bay, and for supporting Israel at the expense of Palestinians—are not unusual criticisms to hear from “liberals.” However, the representation of such criticisms in Law and Order delegitimizes them as the ranting and raving of a lunatic murderer. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 1043

Categorization

• SHARE: A crisp media-studies point about how Law and Order drama pathologizes standard left criticism — worth sending to anyone who teaches media or writing.
• SEED: Angle: television procedural genres as a vehicle for laundering political positions into psychiatric diagnosis.
• XREF: connects to: Mass sporting spectacles are engineered to suppress political antagonism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1606