Abstract
We live in a culture highly sensitised to its own perceived vulnerability which is socially constructed through dominant, mainstream representations, in particular, broadcast television and national presses. Across all genres, television communicates a host of perceived dangers or risks to human survival as entertainment, responding and reproducing the victim or risk consciousness (Furedi, 2005 [1997]) of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Terrorism has captured the imaginations of not only politicians but also producer/writers, and, as a consequence of this and the visual spectacle that war and terrorism provide, it has featured regularly and consistently in British and American television programming since the late 1990s.
This chapter was first published as an original article in Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 62, 85–110. We are grateful for permission to reprint it in full here.
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© 2014 Hugh Ortega Breton
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Breton, H.O. (2014). Coping with a Crisis of Meaning: Televised Paranoia. In: Bainbridge, C., Yates, C. (eds) Media and the Inner World: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345547_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345547_8
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