Television and terror

de Andrew Hoskins, Ben O'Loughlin

Television is a medium of terror. Stories and images of mostly distant violence and bloodshed are streamed continuously into our homes, penetrating our senses of personal and collective safety. And yet the journalism of terror is also the journalism of security. Television, as it delivers daily the spectre of endless terror and violence, also rescues us from the brink of chaos. The unimaginable is rendered familiar and terror is harnessed in the frames, rituals, and routines of the major medium of our age. Hoskins and O'Loughlin demonstrate the power of the entanglement of television and terror in both the spinning and the containing of the discourses of insecurity that mark our mediatized experience of the twenty-first century.