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
3 - The Scale of the Work: The Number of Around 575 DOD-Assisted
Films in Suid’s Books is Already Well Over a Decade Out-of-Date
Our
figure of 697 is higher than even Suid has documented, though in the
vast majority of these cases we have nothing more than a list from
the DOD or an IMDB credit to say that anything occurred. The files we
have received through the FOI combined with other sources indicate
that the DOD supported 814 films between 1911 and 2017, which is over
200 more than Suid’s latest published list from 2005.
We
are certainly not saying that Suid compiled a bad list, especially
since we know first-hand how hard it is to cover every production,
but he has at least missed some from his era. Moreover, he never
lists the figures himself – we have to count and it’s not
entirely clear from his rubric which products were subject to script
revisions. Nor does he systematically display DOD cooperation with TV
at all.
If
we include the 1,133 documented TV titles in our total count, the
number leaps to 1,947 productions. If we are to count the individual
episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland and
NCIS, alongside the influence of other major national security
organizations like the FBI, CIA and White House, then the figure
would be in the thousands.
While
the DOD is by far the most active, the CIA takes the same approach
with considerable success and has affected dozens of projects. It is
time to recognize the roles of both the CIA and DOD in screen
entertainment as being extensive, covert, pro-active and highly
politicized.
The
Available Historical Archives and Histories Say Virtually Nothing
about the DOD and CIA’s Involvement with Other Screen
Entertainment, Namely Television and Video Gaming.
Despite
Suid’s encyclopedic list of movies, comparable histories have never
been produced on the work of the DOD in the television or computer
games industry.
While
most histories and discussion of the ELOs focus on their overt and
obvious role in war films and disaster movies, the Army’s reports
mention assistance granted not just to movies but to an enormous
range of series including chat shows, sports coverage,
military-themed reality shows, other reality TV, competitive reality
series, cooking-themed reality TV, game shows, action adventure
series, dramas, children’s programming, awards shows, military and
non-military documentaries, and independent films including foreign
productions from Belgium, Japan, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland and
Sweden.
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