FoxNews is dead. It no longer drives the national conversation, as it did from 1994 until 2005. CNN, ever the loser of all loser networks, is morphing into FoxNews just as FoxNews is going down the toilet.
What on television is now weaving the postmodern "dreaming mind" of the Right Wing? Answer: 24. Keefer Sutherland is the real Educator-in-Chief, not George W. Bush. The nuclear weapon introduced this season is clearly a statement in support of the Iran War...
What does 24 do? Its "Gitmo is Everywhere" universe serves as the "reality context" for the political vocabulary of the Right, which then attempts to argue from a "virtual truth perspective" constructed from this shared experience. As the latest flagship "dream weaver" of the Right Wing, 24 is the main Matrix-like storyline around which the rest of the Right Wing "reality plot" flows.
The 24 "fear experience" allows the Right to be convinced of the urgent need to suspend Constitutional freedoms. It allows them to believe that torture is necessary.
Until last year, FoxNews served that flagship reality-creation function, but much more comprehensively and pervasively. In its heyday, FNC became the greatest reality tv show of all time, a spectacular experiment in mass psychology that succeded for nearly a decade. But now the FNC bubble-universe has been punctured irreparably. The pundits now just look like laughingstocks.
Fox has now fallen back on Jack Bauer to save them. The ever-entertaining 24 is clearly not as powerful a weapon as FoxNews, but it is still effective enough to help conjure the next phase of the Neocon Grand Plan.
24 is likely to remain popular for the rest of this Presidential term (no matter who serves it out), and then will fade away once we have a new president. Its own particular dream world depends too much on the Bush/Cheney mystique to survive beyond this political era. In a few years, the Middle Eastern terrorists on 24 may well look as hyperstereotypical as the Columbian drug lords in old episodes of Hunter.
This is how the War on Terror will finally end and fade into history...with a cancelation notice from Rupert Murdoch.