Media representations have played an important part in generating nationalist sentiments and, as was argued in chapter 3, extreme nationalism has its root in the desire, psychologically, to kill death. Anderson's (1991) thesis of the imagined national community includes the argument that the print media played an important historical part in establishing a confident sense of'community in anonymity’ (1991: 36), through the creation of a nationally shared language. This helped people to feel that their experiences of everyday life were universally shared. The deaths of national leaders are occasions for the symbolic exploration of the forces that create this feeling. The role of media in this was seen, for example, in the ritualisation of the death of Lincoln (Schwartz 1991), where newspapers played an important part in converting the president into a sacred symbol around which nationalist sentiment could gather. In modern times themes of national fragmentation and unity are played out in television treatments of the deaths of important leaders. Trujillo (1993) has analysed this in relation to the death of Kennedy. Tsaliki (1995) has shown how the Greek media portrayals of the death of Melina Mercouri helped to construct an imagined national community. The media therefore play an important part in maintaining what Bellah (1967) has called ‘civil religion’, through their reporting of death.

More generally, we can see that in late modernity personal experience is increasingly mediated by television, newspapers, magazines, novels and other such cultural products of communication and representation.