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After 9/11, Rove pressured the entertainment industry ‘to produce propaganda.’ (5 posts)

1. truthmod
   Administrator

   http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/01/rove-media-pro...

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/media/0...

   Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, a delegation of high-level media executives, including the heads of every major studio, met several times with White House officials, including at least once with President Bush’s former top strategist, Karl Rove, to discuss ways that the entertainment industry could play a part in improving the image of the United States overseas.

   One of the central ideas was using “soft power” by spreading American television and movies to foreign audiences, especially in the Muslim world, to help sway public opinion.

   There were few tangible results from the meetings — lesser ways of supporting the war on terrorism like public service announcements and packages of free DVDs sent to American soldiers.

   But since then, the media companies have gotten what they wanted, even if the White House has not. In the last eight years, American pop culture, already popular, has boomed around the globe while opinions of America itself have soured.

   Posted 16 years ago #
2. emanuel
   Member

   It was more than just overseas propaganda. It was domestic propaganda too. There was an explosion of "torture normalization" in TV in the years after 9/11. The show, "24" is a good example. Even "Lost" (which I love) had many scenes of "justified" torture.

   Emanuel

   Posted 16 years ago #
3. JohnA
   Member

   ever see Bugs Bunny doing his imitation of the Japanese after 1941?

   you won't see that episode on Saturday mornings anymore.

   Posted 16 years ago #
4. truthmover
   Administrator

   "Threat Matrix" "Sleeper Cell" "E-Ring" "Lightning Force" "Homeland Security USA" "The Border" "The Grid" "Profiles From the Front Line" All tv shows I've never seen or won't watch. All pure propaganda from inception to broadcast.

   As much as we see the normalization of torture, we also see the normalization of skirting the Constitution, domestic counter-intelligence, and military technology. The ends justify the means.

   "24" feels like it's written by DHS itself. We certainly know for a fact that the military works closely with Hollywood on movies, but they've always recognized the importance of television as well. First the news, and then later the production of dramas. Here's someone who's fed up with it.

   I'm all for a Congressional investigation into the Pentagon's Iraq propaganda operation -- which included an active-duty general exhorting ex-military-turned-paid-pundits that "the strategic target remains our population."

   But I'm also for keeping the focus and onus on CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, even NPR - who were partners in the Pentagon's mission of "information dominance." And for us to see that American TV news remains so corrupt today that it has hardly mentioned the Times story on the Pentagon's pundits, which was based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents acquired by a successful Times lawsuit.

   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-cohen/military-...

   I think this whole issue is worth exposing further. I'm looking for a site that deals with this issue thoroughly. I can't find one that lists off all TV shows related to the War on Terror with a summary of their episodes.

   Anyone seen a site like that before?

   Posted 16 years ago #
5. emanuel
   Member

   We should start up that site ourselves. The problem is that we will need to watch too much TV. LOL.

   Ok and while we're on the topic I should confess that I watched some of the new Battlestar Galactica series (downlaoded of course--I don't own a TV). I loved the first episode, which had such great potential, but then I swear it got to be so much of a military-propaganda show that I stopped watching. There was this one episode worth mentioning though, because it really blew me away. I realized after this episode that this show was designed specifically to propagandize soldiers. Get this...

   So the show was about this "black market" that was taking place in the colonies, and the main characters (military people on board the battlestar galactica ship of course) were trying to stop it. It was like this underground group of mafia-type thugs were engaging in illegal trade of guns, drugs, and prostitutes. So the main characters get into this confrontation with the thugs, and they end up killing the one main thug who was also selling children for sex purposes, and was clearly portrayed as the most immoral and despicable person ever. So they kill him and then tell the other thugs that they can continue their black market activities as long as they stop trafficking children. Then they go back and tell the president (who wanted all the black market activities stopped) that there is "no way" they can stop the black market, that if they arrested or killed all these thugs, that others would just take their place, so that it was better to "control them." The military characters told the president that they made "inroads" into this network and thus can "keep an eye on them" and that this was better because at least they wouldn't do really egregious stuff.

   Now cut to the US objectives in Afghanistan, which we all know is mainly to protect the poppy fields. I know a few guys currently in Afghanistan. They know why they are there. So I can think of no better propaganda for soldiers in Afghanistan than this episode. I have no doubts the military was very central in the writing and script.

   Emanuel

   Posted 16 years ago #

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