ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how the media form a site of threat politics, applying some theoretical insights to a comparative empirical analysis of news texts. While the analytical concept of 'framing' is common to that of the other contributors, the theoretical literature underpinning the chapter emanates from the field of mass communication research rather than security and risk studies. The chapter is concerned with 'banal' news reporting which gives people access to the realm in which enduring Weltanschauung are conditioned. The importance to political behaviour of the 'extensional' or mediated realm, filled with information about threatening 'others,' can be assumed to endure when the salience of images has displaced that of words 'in the cultural production and construction of difference'. The implications of insights are that, when studying images of threat in television news, it is not sufficient to analyse reports of current and former enemies, or even 'foreign news'.
