TV dramas and government PR jointly normalized torture in the War on Terror.

Evidence

Certainly 24 alone is not responsible for shifting perspectives in favor of justifying torture or “abuse.” Representations of torture on 24 are part of a larger field of meaning and exist alongside the Bush administration’s enormous public relations efforts to make torture palatable to the American mainstream and make torture legally acceptable, often despite its clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. The news media and government officials succeeded in making torture acceptable and necessary, and TV dramas participated in doing the ideological work (even as they offered post-9/11 representational strategies that resisted stereotyping) to justify the U.S. government’s actions during the War on Terror. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 302

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Milgrom’s institutions-and-information line into culture: representations are a meaning-infrastructure that governments and media co-produce. — connects to: The War on Terror formally recruited Hollywood into the national security state — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 753