Jack Bauer, 24Justice Antonin Scalia

Jonathan Sterne pointed out this article in Canada’s Globe and Mail, about a visit from Justice Antonin Scalia to a panel discussion hosted in Ottawa. Things got surreal when a Candian judge made the mistake of saying, “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’”. Apparently, Scalia jumped to defend the fictional hero of 24:

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

“So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”

Jonathan reminds us that, when scholars of media and communication fret about the effects of media, they too often are thinking of particular kinds of audiences: children, the poor, the uneducated, immigrants. We don’t often think about whether media shapes the worldviews of highly educated, white, Supreme Court justices, or even military school undergraduates.

This would be funny, a Quayle-esque Murphy Brown moment, except in light of recent concerns raised by teachers at West Point, who appealed to the producer of 24 to stop presenting torture as a reasonable and effective way of getting information. In the West Point classrooms they were finding that students had an increasingly blasé attitude about torture, borrowing the outlook of the show that “whatever it takes” is acceptable in the name of national security. I’m still inclined to see this as more of an indicator of how powerfully the public debate in this country is still gripped by a security-or-catastrophe paradigm, that makes it possible for the hyper-muscular ideology of 24 to strike the chord it does. But it does concern me that someone like Scalia, despite his conservative inclinations, should know better than to legitimize that kind of blurriness between political concerns and narrative ones.