The fortress under siege

Zbigniew Bauer, Andrzej Wojnach

The attack on the World Trade Center, and the war on terrorism launched by the United States and their allies, have fundamentally changed the face of the news; the way in which world events are reported, and the way in which the viewer perceives them. We have suddenly begun to perceive the information that had once appeared fictional, as "real".

One of the elements of this new way of news presentation and the understanding of information has become the metaphor. The paper uses two metaphors: "Crusade" (this is used to explain the political acts of the coalition parties and the Islamic world), and the "Fortress under Siege" (according to the authors, this is the current stance in the media.) Despite attempts made to rationalize our current world view, we are witnesses to the blurring of the boundaries between insanity and normalcy, as never before. This breeds the blockage of the effective transmission of world news, and the media - especially television - are more frequently the creators of entertainment news, and not a sources of information about real events.

KEYWORDS

Transgression, metaphor, infotainment, militainment, crusade, fortress