Mediatized terror treats media as constitutive rather than reflective of conflict

Evidence

This is certainly the process The Unknown Terrorist is interested in. The novel is concerned with power and the media as well as with the power of the media. It charts what Simon Cottle would call the “mediatizing” of terror: the way media take on a “performative” and “constitutive” rather than a neutral or reflective role in relation to conflicts. Mediated images are used to construct an incriminating story about the Doll as she goes on the run. Just as she has embodied a mediated “female ideal” in her sexualized performances—“the ideal of beautiful women as cadaverous children” (6)—so the image of her as dangerous terrorist is propagated through television and radio news bulletins, talk shows, and the ranting of shock jocks. At one point, seeking temporary refuge in a shopping mall, the Doll comes across a giant plasma screen showing footage of a terror news montage that weaves her image into a story of international conflict and atrocity, presided over by a “monstrous,” outsized Richard Cody as anchorman (148–49). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 359

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Cottle’s ‘mediatizing’ as a critical term: media perform and constitute the fear rather than neutrally report it.
• XREF: The constitutive-media concept directly arms the reader’s hinge work on how Hamid and Naqvi’s narrators perform rather than report Islamic identity — the same performative mechanism Morey flags here. — connects to: War and film are a single continuous technological event — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 194; Media hyperrealisation enables rather than cancels real mass deaths — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1452; Destroying terrorists creates replayable atrocity images that amplify terror — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1454 (+2 more)
• SEED: Could be the analytic frame for an essay on how The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy use narrative performance as a counter-mediatizing move — protagonists who constitute their own stories against the state’s montage.