Marcus O'Donnell

Jack Bauer: The Smart Warrior's Faustian Gift

Jack Bauer of the television series 24 is a highly charged contemporary mythic character who exists in powerful relationship to past and present real-world and fictional figures. If Rambo was a classic Reagan era cinematic ‘hard body’ (Jeffords, 1994), Jack is the archetypal Bush ‘smart warrior’ in a post -Patriot Act era. Like Rambo, Reagans displays of bravado were decisive and successfully staged; however, George Bush has faced a multiplying set of uncertainties. This sets up a more complex set of relations between Jack, George W. Bush and contemporary masculinities than those presented by the Reagan era. Jack is both an emblem of unimpeded presidential will and a parable of its Faustian consequences.

The role of special edition editorials in forging and maintaining links between newspapers and the communities they serve

Abstract Successful newspapers manage to carve out a niche for themselves with the communities they seek to represent, often appealing to what they perceive as the particular needs and interests of prospective readers. This is particularly evident in the case of newspapers in rural and regional communities that are in the early stages of development. This paper looks at the development of newspapers in two emerging communities, the Northern Territory and Tasmania’s north-west coast, during the late nineteenth century and explores how they use editorials to build and maintain their relationship with readers, both in their set-up period and during milestone events in their history.