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This article is about how national security culture sets out, in raced, gendered, and classed terms, to prepare the U.S. public to take up their role as citizens of empire. The cultural imagination of national security, I argue, is shaped both by the national security state and the media industry. Drawing on archival material, I offer a contextual analysis of key national security visual texts in two periods--the early Cold War era and the Obama phase of the War on Terror. A comparative analysis of the two periods shows that while Cold War practices inform the War on Terror, there are also discontinuities. A key difference is the inclusion of women and people of color within War on Terror imperial citizenship, inflected by the logic of a neoliberal form of feminism and multiculturalism. I argue that such inclusion is not positive and urge scholars to combine an intersectional analysis of identity with a structural critique of neoliberal imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now widely acknowledged that the Bush administration used faulty and false information to justify the 2003 war on Iraq, and that the mainstream media, by not adequately investigating the case for war, assisted with the project. In this paper, I outline the particular strategies employed by the media–military industrial complex to ensure a dominance of pro-war arguments in the public sphere. I conclude by arguing that the failure of the media in the US to meet the democratic needs of this society places enormous responsibility on intellectuals to produce scholarship critical of the new imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1997 United Parcel Service (UPS) strike highlighted the conflict of interests between corporations and their employees, challenging the notion that the 1 990s economic recovery had benefited all Americans equally. Television coverage of this strike, however, failed to reflect the class nature of this conflict. Instead, it framed the strike in nationalist terms and projected the interests of business onto the nation by constructing a harmonious national community with shared goals. Through a textual analysis of 269 news reports on ABC, CBS, and NBC, this article discusses the economic and social components of the "nationalist antistrike narrative." Economically, this narrative constructs the viewer as a middle-class consumer and invites the audience to identify with UPS. Socially, it offers mechanisms of cor- porate and national conflict resolution based on idealized nuclear family relations. This article argues that the narrative's logic stems from the institutional structure of American television, which is simultaneously a national and a nationalizing medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]