TV dramas helped constitute a public that could debate the War on Terror

Evidence

Although the impact of their particular representational strategies is limited, the impact of the TV dramas themselves is far-reaching. Operating as sites to discuss and debate the War on Terror, TV dramas have participated in mediating the war itself. They do this by producing a public around it, by lifting “people from the realm of their idiosyncratic interests, their ‘particularity,’ towards the realm of common interests, the ‘universal’ values that join them together and define a collectivity of spectators as precisely a ‘public.’” — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 281

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how mass media create a ‘public’ by shifting viewers from particularity to common interests.
• XREF: connects to: Broadcast television uniquely allowed serious class drama to reach a cross-class national audience — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 336; The War on Terror formally recruited Hollywood into the national security state — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 753