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
7 - Conclusions
The
existing literature on the operations of the DOD and CIA ELOs is
inadequate because it fails to account for the enormous scale of the
phenomenon and its politicized, secretive and proactive nature.
When
we first looked at the relationship between the national security
services and motion pictures around the turn of the 21st century, we
accepted the consensus opinion that state propaganda in the
entertainment industry consisted of little more than a small office
at the Pentagon, which had assisted the production of around 200
films throughout the history of modern media. This was flat out
wrong.
A
recent CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report into the Agency’s
engagement with the entertainment industry highlights the
difficulties that academics and journalists face when trying to
research this subject. The OIG’s review took place in the wake of
the scandal over secret information being given to the filmmakers
behind Zero Dark Thirty. The report studied eight projects that the
ELO had worked on, out of 22 in total between 2006 and 2011,
including Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, documentaries for the BBC and the
History Channel, the spy drama Covert Affairs and an episode of Top
Chef.
The
OIG criticized the ELO for poor record-keeping – there were no
records on three out of the eight projects and only limited records
for the other five. They also objected to the ELO for not having
conducted an assessment of the consistency or effectiveness of their
policies on granting or denying assistance to projects. Perhaps most
seriously, the OIG admonished the ELO for breaching security
protocols designed to protect classified information. The report
notes how some meetings between entertainment industry
representatives and CIA officers took place outside of CIA
facilities, sometimes with the officers under cover, sometimes
without any guidance from the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) before
the meetings, and often without anyone from the OPA being present.
This quasi-deniable relationship between the CIA and the
entertainment industry means that even its own OIG cannot conduct a
proper review of their operations, let alone researchers or the
press. The lack of accountability is profoundly undemocratic. The
number of 22 projects between January 2006 and April 2012 shows that
after Chase Brandon’s departure the CIA’s operations in the
entertainment industry continued on a similar scale.
The
Pentagon has often intervened in the political and social dimensions
of private-sector movies and entertainment products featuring
military hardware or dramatizations of war and ‘national security’
matters. This has taken place especially in the preproduction phase,
including in scripts, when withdrawal of military assistance may lead
to cancellation of the movie project. While the CIA has far fewer
cinematic assets and therefore less leverage over creative decisions,
they have also demonstrated the ability to make substantial and
politically-motivated changes to major movies.
Indeed,
it appears the DOD have taken a leaf out of the CIA’s playbook as
it has recently sought to become involved in entertainment
productions from the earliest stages of the creative process. From
2010 to 2012 the Pentagon’s ELOs met with agents from William
Morris Endeavor, one of the largest talent agencies in Hollywood, the
heads of production for the ‘Group of 8’, and senior executives
at Warner Bros and Columbia Pictures. The ELO reports state that the
purpose of these meetings was for the DOD to find out how to better
‘enter studio projects early in the development stages when
characters and storylines are most easily shaped to the Army’s
benefit’ and so they could, ‘get involved early in the production
timeline on potential projects and programs so we can help shape the
topics before they are finalized by the studio executives’ (US
Army, 2015). The most recently released documents show that the Air
Force are inviting Hollywood executives on extended tours of military
facilities to generate contacts and provide opportunities to ‘discuss
Air Force storylines that [Air Force Public Affairs] is interested in
highlighting’ (USAF, 2017). This more proactive approach is
identical to the Chase Brandon era when, according to CIA chief of
public affairs Bill Harlow, Brandon spent ‘many hours’ on the
phone pitching ideas to writers (Jenkins and Alford, 2012). As such,
while the CIA’s involvement in Hollywood is on a smaller scale than
the DOD, the modus operandi of the two agencies is increasingly
similar.
The
CIA and DOD’s ability to alter the politics of our entertainment,
without having to acknowledge publicly that they are doing so, raises
fundamental ethical, legal, democratic and even epistemological
concerns. In Alford’s own earlier work, building on Ed Herman and
Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model, an inherent assumption is that the
media industry filters out material that challenges powerful
interests in a typically passive manner. What this latest research
shows is that we cannot be complacent. The state is substantially
more involved in the active manufacture of consent through
entertainment than has been previously demonstrated.
***
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