ABSTRACT
It would perhaps be more accurate to say may become apparent because, as we shall see, the typical reaction of the news media serves to further obscure those structural problems by reasserting the legitimacy of prevailing social arrangements. The press, particularly, becomes a repository and disseminator of the collective fantasies of the established order as it struggles to keep chaos at bay. The role of these collective fantasies at times of widespread social change has been analyzed by Christopher Booker in his intermittently perceptive study of post-war Britain (1970). He writes:
'As a society loses its organic homogeneity, lines of stress appear between its component groups - between class and class, between generation and generation, between rulers and ruled. Two things then happen. First, as each group becomes more conscious of its own identity so it tends to project a group-fantasy embodying its dreams of self-assertion, and its aggression against other groups. Obviously the group-fantasies of the "underprivileged" of the lower classes, the young, the rising ethnic group, tend to be "vitality" fantasies (making up what we may call the basic "left-wing" fantasy) associated with change, revolution, vigour, freedom and the future. While the groupfantasies of the established order, which feels itself to be threatened by this new aggressive force and reacts with aggression of its own, the upper classes, the older generation, the dominant racial group, take the form of "orderly" fantasies associated with stability, law and order, discipline, resistance to change and the better days of the past.' (Booker 1970:64)
While much of Booker's theorizing rests on questionable foundations (notably the highly deterministic model of a 'fantasy cycle' he uses in his analysis), his conceptualizations of right and
left-wing fantasy can be heuristically useful to the student of law-and-order news.
