Interrogating 24: Making Sense of US Counter-terrorism in the Global War on Terrorism

As an increasing number of scholars have argued, the fiction of popular culture and the reality of politics are inseparable. Fact and fiction, rather than remaining distinct, are mutually constitutive and interact to produce new meaning. A critical reading of Fox Television's intensely popular series 24 suggests that the series (re)produces key elements of the global war on terrorism discourse and is therefore a particularly useful case for under standing the importance of intertextuality for the production of meaning. Though the packaging of 24 may be new and exciting, the underlying messages remain the same, in the process rendering commonsensical the US global war on terrorism and the way that it has been waged.