The Citizen Treatment: Media, National Identity, and Citizenship Discourse in the USA from 9/11 to Obama's Election.

Abstract

The Citizen Treatment contributes to our understanding of the mass media and citizenship by discussing the ways in which citizenship is continually managed, manipulated, and contested in a variety of media texts. Focusing on American television, looking at the time between 9/11 and Obama’s election, I examine both informational and entertainment texts, tracking the ways in which citizenship is called forth and acted upon in the media. In the news and in entertainment programming, American audiences are continually presented with conflicting citizenship forms and the media privilege some forms over others. As I analyze the reality television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and the action-adventure drama Heroes, I track a shift in dominant discourse away from private citizenship, toward public citizenship. Having distilled into three complexes the ways in which the discourse of citizenship can announce itself within a text, I introduce the notion of “the citizen treatment,” which refers to a privileged position some individuals are given in media texts. This position is produced through interactions of the characters with the complexes of citizenship as well as the character’s treatment in the narrative and by the television lights, cameras and microphones. As citizenship discourse changes, the types of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that earn characters the citizen treatment are transformed.