It's been too long for me to give you any specific example, and not everything in 24 was xenophobic.

Admitedly, part of that is also simply inherent to American culture where depicting foreigners the way 24 often did is perfectly acceptable, and I understand that. To most Americans this isn't xenophobia, your threshold of what's acceptable and what's too much when depicting or bringing up foreign cultures is quite higher than ours. For instance, just a while ago there was that negative ad from the Gingrich camp that painted Romney as unfit as candidate due to several points, among which was the fact that "like John Kerry" he could speak French (it was ridiculous, this "he speaks French" in that same digusted ominous tone as if they said he ate christian babies or something). This was reported on the day in the main media pretty much all over the world - didn't make much of a fuss in the US itself that I could see. In countries not to pro-US much was made about xenophobia and arrogance (ironically, the francophone media were the ones that present it best, commenting that it was anti-intellectualism and targeted a specific strata of the US population and republican electorate that is suspicious of foreign cultures but most of all despise the American elites - and that, if it raised a very stupid point to do it it was primarly meant to associate Romney to Kerry, long before being xenophobia proper, or even singling out the French really, though they pointed out not all languages are equal and they would never have dared accuse Romney of speaking Spanish, which would have been seen not only a xenophobic but even racist, for instance). But still.. in most western nations you just can't say something like that during a campaign without being labelled a xenophobe (and that you are speaking to voters who are mildly xenophobic and none too educated is not an excuse, it makes it worse if anything), not without major negative impact on the voters. In the US, you can.

Ironically, this very issue of torture (and 24) cropped up in our news two days ago. The Canadian government just officially granted our equivalent of the FBI the right to use information obtained by torture in imminent threat situations exactly like those when Bauer used torture on 24. Not to obtain information through torture, of course, just to use information handed them by foreign powers, when obtained through torture. Not that they did not befor, illegally, but that has made a big fuss every time the public found out (one ongoing scandal concerns a young prisoner in Guantanamo, a child-soldier, who's there partly on evidence linked to torture. Worse still is the one where a Canadian was sent to Syria (under US pressure) where he was tortured, and then back here was treated for years as a suspected terrorist though the evidence was solely obtained through torture, passed to us via the FBI. A few years later, he was exonerated completely, and got tons of money for damages and so on. Edifying.)

Anyway, this sparked a public debate of course. Beside the sheer hypocrisy of it - we won't permit torture, we're not even allowed to extradite someone to a country where he risks torture, but it's apparently fine if another country does it and we use it, and all the moral issues aside, Canadians in majority believe information obtained that way is almost never reliable. On a radio show, they had this American sociologue (comparing what is happening here to how it's dealt with in the US is very common for us), someone from Harvard, I forget his name. Anyway, the guy had much the same problems I mentionned with 24 (and shows and movies like it since 9/11), though he far more critical than I am about the impact of all this sort of "entertainment" has on certain parts of the American public and their opinions of issues like torture.