New evidence for the surprisingly significant propaganda role of the CIA and the DOD in the screen entertainment industry
This
article reassesses the relationships of the Central Intelligence
Agency and Department of Defense with the American entertainment
industry. Both governmental institutions present their relationships
as modest in scale, benign in nature, passive, and concerned with
historical and technical accuracy rather than politics. The limited
extant commentary reflects this reassuring assessment. However, we
build on a patchy reassessment begun at the turn of the 21st century,
using a significant new set of documents acquired through the Freedom
of Information Act. We identify three key facets of the
state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or absent
from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The
withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the
work; and 3. The level of politicization. As such, the article
emphasizes a need to pay closer attention to the deliberate
propaganda role played by state agencies in promoting the US national
security state through entertainment media in western societies.
Part
1 - Method and Literature: The Need to Refocus on Entertainment
Production Processes
When
examining the political nature of a piece of entertainment, we can
variously consider the intentions and motivations of its creators,
how meaning is encoded in the text itself, or audience reception. All
three are important and legitimate approaches within media studies
but it is a striking feature of the literature that so little is
written about the role of the US national security state, most
prominently embodied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
Department of Defense (DOD), in shaping the content of screen
entertainment.
This
tendency to shy away from production analysis has been exacerbated
and legitimized by the postmodern turn, the pervasive influence of
Freudian analysis, and the cross-disciplinary emphasis on audiences.
Ed Herman, co-creator of the propaganda model (PM) that attempts to
account for the uncritical nature of elite media discourse, explains
that such a focus on micro-issues of language, textual interpretation
and gender and ethnic identity is ‘politically safe and holds forth
the possibility of endless deconstruction of small points in a
growing framework of jargon’. Consequently, Hollywood journalist Ed
Rampell (2005) can argue that ‘movies are our collective dreams’
and ‘emanations of the collective unconscious’. Influential film
critic and scholar Robin Wood (2003) commented that movies are ‘as
at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams
of their audiences’. US entertainment, it seems, is to be
interpreted and reinterpreted ad infinitum.
In
contrast, when analysing authoritarian forms of governance,
scholarship invariably assumes considerable state influence over
entertainment systems and that they are used as crucial tools to
spread misinformation and disinformation (Hoffmann et al., 1996;
Proway, 1982; Qin, 2017; Reeves, 2004; Taylor, 1998; Welch, 2001).
Similarly, although critical scholars of US news media have suffered
marginalization in academia, even here there has at least long been a
body of material about the role of the state in shaping discourse for
its own ends by authors like Carl Bernstein (1977) and Ed Herman and
Noam Chomsky (2002) and watchdog organizations like the Glasgow Media
Group and Media Lens.
We
also recognize that there is a respectable body of work that
demonstrates how entertainment – going back to the origins of
Hollywood in early 20th century America – represents US power
(Boggs and Pollard, 2007; Burgoyne, 2010; Kellner, 2010; McCrisken
and Pepper, 2007; Prince, 1992; Scott, 2011; Westwell, 2006). One of
the authors on this article, Matthew Alford, engaged similarly in a
mainly text-based set of readings for his early work (2008). What has
long been lacking, though, is a robust body of scholarship on how the
state actually affects productions. Here, we show that a major reason
for this deficiency is the difficulties associated with acquiring
useful documentation, largely the reluctance of state officials in
releasing it.
There
was a brief flurry of new books and articles on state involvement in
the entertainment industry around the turn of the century, but each
of these was decidedly narrow in scope. David Eldridge (2000) and
Frances Stonor Saunders (1999) concentrated on the early Cold War,
with their new material on cinema being limited to their discovery of
an official at Paramount Studios who sent letters to an anonymous CIA
contact explaining how he was using his position to advance the
interests of the agency in the 1950s.
In
two major early 21st century studies, Suid and Haverstick (2002,
2005) systematically document the relationship between the military
and Hollywood. However, remarkably – particularly given the detail
with which he writes and his unique access to source material –
Suid does not question ‘the legitimacy of the military’s
relationship with the film industry’ (noting that Congress permits
it 2002, p. xi) and characterizes the Pentagon entertainment liaison
chief Phil Strub as ‘simply a conduit between the film industry and
the armed services’ (Suid and Robb, 2005: 75, 77 ). A scattergun
and journalistic account by David Robb (2004), the only other
researcher we know to attain even partial, temporary access to the
same set of documents as Suid, highlights numerous cases typically
ignored by Suid that point to much more politicized and controversial
impacts by the DOD. In short, Suid utterly dominates the source
material and his macro and micro analyses are, in light of our new
analysis, little short of a whitewash (Alford, 2016; Alford and
Secker, 2017).
From
2014 to 2017 we made numerous requests to the CIA, US Army, Navy, and
Air Force with regards to their cooperation on films and television
shows. It quickly became apparent that there had been a huge surge
in the number of television shows supported by the DOD,
especially since it decided circa 2005 to begin supporting reality
TV. The authors compiled a master list of DOD-assisted films and TV
using IMDB, the Entertainment Liaison Officer (ELO) reports and DOD
lists, and miscellaneous files, which produced a total of 814 film
titles, 697 made prior to 2004, and 1133 TV titles, 977 since 2004.
Lawrence Suid had missed a handful of DOD-supported films and has not
updated his lists since 2005, so neither he nor any other author had
documented the huge scale of DOD support for television. Added to
that, in 2014 the CIA’s first ELO, Chase Brandon, published a full
list of dozens of film and television shows on which he had worked,
which was many more than any previous public records had indicated.
The White House, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI had
also been involved, as shown by infrequent news reports. By all
measures, even without considering the role of less politically
controversial entities like the Coast Guard and NASA, the US
government has been involved with the entertainment industry on a
scale several times greater than the latest scholarship has
indicated.
This
article shows that the characterization of the DOD and CIA ELOs as
minimally and passively involved in the film industry, merely
receiving and processing requests for technical and other production
assistance, is inaccurate. To do so, we identify three key facets of
the state-entertainment relationship that are under-emphasized or
absent from the existing commentary and historical record: 1. The
withholding of available data from the public; 2. The scale of the
work; and 3. The level of politicization.
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