1The definition of corruption is multi-faceted and sometimes slippery, but, in English, the word has at least two major significations. In the first, corruption relates to improper conduct, especially that which involves the use of bribes or the selling of favors to give unfair advantage to one party over another. The second refers to the alteration of something from its original condition. A photograph can be “corrupted” by extreme temperatures or rain, or the phrase may refer to something less tangible, such as “the corruption of the truth.” This paper argues that many aspects of the U.S. government’s relationship with Hollywood’s entertainment industry can be defined as corrupt in both definitions of the word. Indeed, the U.S. government-entertainment complex often results in a corruption of the truth and in corrupt industry practices that limit or narrow the marketplace of ideas. Before analyzing the complex’s relationship to corruption, however, this paper first defines and explains the government-entertainment complex and how it works in the United States.
2Nearly every major government agency in the United States uses tax-payer money to work with film and television producers to influence citizens’ opinions, beliefs and value through Hollywood entertainment products. These agencies include every branch of the US military (such as the Airforce, Navy, Marines, and Army), as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and even the Center for Disease Control (CDC). These agencies have either a small, dedicated entertainment liaison office that works with filmmakers directly, or the agency’s larger public affairs office handles this aspect of business.
- 1 Roger Stahl, director, Theaters of War, Media Educational Foundation, 2022. 88 minutes.
- 2 Tom Secker, “Iron Man 2 Edwards AFB Footage,” Vimeo.com, 2017, https://vimeo.com/191818335
3Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary, Theaters of War1, helps to illustrate the size and scope of the US government-entertainment complex by examining just one of its arms – that of the U.S. military. Stahl reveals that several thousands of films and television episodes – ranging from war dramas to cupcake-based reality TV shows — have been subject to the creative input and control of the US armed forces, as opposed to the several hundred that had previously been suspected by scholars. The film also demonstrates that the Department of Defense (DOD) is by far the strongest and most powerful player in the government-entertainment complex when compared to other agencies because it has the expensive hardware that is difficult for filmmakers to recreate in CGI or to secure from other parties (such as foreign militaries or third-party vendors). Where else, for example, can filmmakers get the plethora of jets, aircraft carriers, and bases that were used in either the first or the second Top Gun movies (Tony Scott, 1986 and Joseph Kosinski, 2022), all at a cut-rate price? Likewise, where else could Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010) producer Jeremy Latcham secure over $1.5 billion worth of C-17s, B2 bombers, F-22s and F-35s for pennies on the dollar to make his superheroes’ world appear cutting edge, while also helping to display the film’s military characters, such as Rhodey (Don Cheadle), as working for an advanced and powerful armed force?2
- 3 Paul Barry, personal interview with the author, March 3, 2008.
- 4 “Now Playing Archive,” CIA.gov, accessed July 1, 2012, https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/publicaff (...)
- 5 Tricia Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television (Austin: University (...)
- 6 Cruise eventually dropped out the project, as he felt the role was too close to his character of Et (...)
4Because other government agencies such as CIA, FBI and NASA lack the hardware of the Department of Defense, they are not as powerful in the film industry as the military, but they still influence media texts significantly. While the DOD can withhold access to its hardware until a scriptwriter meets its demands for favorable messaging, technical accuracy and recruitment goals, other agencies can really only negotiate with the use of their official seals and access to their technical consultants, experts, and campuses in order to secure more favorable representations of themselves in media texts. These assets, however, are much easier for filmmakers to re-create or obtain elsewhere, and as a result, these agencies must often work harder than the DOD to influence scripts in the development and pre-production stages where they can influence narrative and character development more effectively. For example, Paul Barry, a former entertainment liaison officer for CIA, told me in an interview that he often scoured trade journals such as the Hollywood Reporter and Variety and then contacted the producers of relevant upcoming projects to let them know about his agency’s entertainment-based services.3 On the CIA entertainment liaison's webpage, Barry also created a space called “Now Playing,” which suggested possible story lines for writers and producers to explore. Of course, these suggestions only featured tales of CIA successes, including the engineering of the Berlin Tunnel, the story of “a potent counterintelligence response” against the East called “The Farewell Dossier,” and the Agency's “superb” efforts regarding air operations in Laos from 1955 to 1974.4 Bill Harlow, a former CIA director of public affairs, recalls that Chase Brandon, a CIA veteran who became the agency’s very first film and television liaison, also spent “countless” hours on the phone pitching ideas to writers and working with directors.5 At one stage, CIA even hired Michael Sands, a defense contractor, actor, and media image consultant, to further its network of Hollywood contacts. Starting in 2007, Sands began introducing Barry to people such as Scott Valentine, vice president of Sony Pictures; Jack Gilardi, executive vice president at International Creative Management (ICM); Rick Nicita, partner at Creative Artists Agency (CAA); Ron Meyer, president and COO of Universal Studios; and several others. According to Sands, Barry was particularly interested in meeting with Nicita because his wife, Paula Wagner, was the co-president of Cruise/Wagner Productions. At the time, Tom Cruise intended to play the lead role in Salt6 (Phillip Noyce 2010), a movie about a CIA operative accused of being a Russian sleeper, and his company was in the process of rewriting the film script, and thus Barry wanted to offer his assistance.
- 7 Tricia Jenkins, “How the Central Intelligence Agency Works with Hollywood: An Interview with Paul B (...)
- 8 David Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Censors the Movies (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books (...)
5Given the significant number of hours and tax-payer dollars spent on such initiatives, why do government agencies invest in working with Hollywood producers? One of the first and most obvious reasons is recruitment. The military has long wrestled with the problem of ensuring it has enough members to staff a robust, but completely voluntary defense force, while other government agencies – like NASA and CIA — need to figure out how to recruit staff who could easily work in more lucrative private sector jobs. In fact, Paul Barry stated that when he reviewed scripts to decide which projects CIA would support, he always looked for films that would help the agency “recruit, develop and retain individuals” from a needed and diverse talent pool.7 The DOD also cites recruitment as an explicit reason to work with Hollywood because few, if any, other recruitment strategies provide access to such a diverse and large audience as Hollywood movies, and few, if any, have the potential to generate the same type of results. For example, after Top Gun hit theaters, David Robb reports that the naval aviation program enjoyed a 500% increase in applications.8
- 9 National Guard, “Soldier of Steel Theater Spot 1,” YouTube.com, accessed on July 1, 2023, https://w (...)
- 10 Robb, Operation Hollywood, 26.
6An example of the military’s efforts to recruit through Hollywood can be seen in its participation in the Superman movie’s Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013) campaign, where the National Guard worked with director Zack Snyder to create and then run a recruitment trailer before the film in theaters. The commercial, which can be viewed on YouTube,9 works to draw a visual parallel between Clark Kent and American civilians, who, when they put on a cape or a National Guard uniform, transform into superheroes. The ad intercuts images of Superman rescuing victims of natural disasters and other dangerous situations with National Guard members doing the same. The commercial then ends with a call to visit the Soldier of Steel weblink, where viewers can apply to join the National Guard or contact a recruitment officer. An almost identical tactic was employed in 2019 by the Air Force, as they ran ads targeting female recruits before the theatrical showings of Captain Marvel (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2019), a film that heavily promotes the Air Force through the characters of Carol Danvers and Maria Rambeau and was fully supported by the branch during production. As Robb states, collaborations like this work “because the Pentagon has what Hollywood wants — access to billions of dollars-worth of sophisticated military hardware to put into movies; and Hollywood has what the Pentagon wants — access to the eyeballs of millions of viewers and potential recruits.”10
- 11 David Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 5 (...)
- 12 Robb, Operation Hollywood, 183.
7But recruitment is not the only element that drives the government-entertainment complex in the United States. There are at least four other reasons the government is invested in this relationship: firstly it helps to educate the public about what an agency does; secondly it can help an agency to whitewash history or to ensure the public holds favorable perceptions of its performance, thirdly it can help an organization to increase its congressional budgets/levels of funding, and then it assists in advancing an outfit’s own agendas, goals or policies. In terms of securing funding/increasing an agency budget, NASA recently worked on Netflix’s series Away (2020), which features a team of international astronauts headed on an inaugural mission to Mars. At a press conference in the pilot episode, the astronauts are asked why the US should spend money on Mars’ exploration, instead of on social imperatives, such as health services and education, here on Earth. Mission commander Emma Green (Hillary Swank) responds to this criticism, arguing that the two endeavors are not mutually exclusive and then challenging America’s prioritization of war spending. Green states that the US alone spends “a trillion dollars each year on military spending,” and mostly in case the countries which are represented as partners on their mission, such as Russia and China, “decide to blow each other off the face of the Earth.” NASA’s internationally cooperative mission “costs a fraction of that,” she states. Her comment is then followed by different astronauts explaining the scientific research they are carrying out on the International Space Station to help improve life on Earth, including mining the moon’s polar icecaps for new sources of fuel and water — lines which help the real NASA to justify both its mission and its budget. While researchers have yet to study how much film and television series have positively impacted Congressional budgets or Congress people’s perceptions of agencies, government officials are certain there is a positive correlation. For instance, Carl Sagan often worried that funding for the controversial SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute would be pulled, and thus to increase the perceived value of the institute, he supported the movie adaptation of his novel, Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997), which featured SETI discovering a radio signal sent by an alien culture.11 Major David Georgi, a consultant assigned by the Army to several films, also recognized the funding aspect of Hollywood collaborations, stating, “We want to show Congress what we can do. Obviously, a movie is not always 100 percent factual, so when we get Congress to watch it, they see [us] in a favorable light, and down the road, this [helps] with funding.”12
- 13 Peggy England to Chris Henick, “A Global Coalition Against Terrorism: Advertising and Hollywood Out (...)
- 14 Peggy England to Chris Henick, “A Global Coalition”.
8While the whitewashing of history is addressed in the next section, in terms of promoting government agendas, consider that shortly after 9/11, the President’s Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor, Karl Rove, met with several Hollywood executives to directly ask for their help in advancing a set of talking points/ideologies that the Bush administration felt would assist the U.S. in the new War on Terror. More specifically, on Oct 24, 2001, Peggy England, the Director of Strategic Communication at the State Department, sent a report to Chris Henick, Rove’s Deputy, entitled, “A Global Coalition Against Terrorism: Advertising and Hollywood Outreach.” That document became the foundation for President Bush’s outreach program in Hollywood, as in it, the State Department outlined both a domestic and international agenda for communicating about the war that was delivered by Rove at the November Hollywood summit. This report stated that Hollywood should be asked and used to “engage” and “sustain Americans’ support for the war,” to reinforce the country’s “exceptional qualities of democracy, freedom, tolerance, faith and national unity,” to mobilize an international coalition, and to encourage aid to the Afghan people through humanitarian relief.13 To achieve these broad objectives, the State Department further proposed that Hollywood present terrorists as “false prophets, cowards and criminals” who have hijacked Islam “ in the name of evil” and to stress that the War on Terror is not a war against Muslims, but rather against terrorists and extremists. In contrast, Americans should be depicted in entertainment media as those who “respect human life” and who are a “generous, humane and decent people, coming to the aid of the Afghan people (as a top donor in humanitarian aid).”14 While Hollywood was resistant to creating content for the government, documents such as these reveal how precisely the government crafts the messages it wishes to circulate through global entertainment and how valuable it sees its relationship with one of America’s most powerful exporters.
9Now that the basic nature and goals of the government-entertainment complex in the United States have been outlined, I would like to shift focus to the intersection of film and corruption, in its myriad forms. The next obvious question to ask, then, is: is the government-entertainment complex “corrupt,” and if so, in what ways specifically? The easiest way to answer this question is to first consider how this special relationship often leads to the “alteration of something from its original condition,” especially in the context of “the corruption of the truth.”
- 15 Roger Stahl, Theaters of War, Media Educational Foundation, 2022.
- 16 Department of Veteran Affairs, “PTSD: National Center for PTSD,” Feb 3, 2023, https://www.ptsd.va.g (...)
- 17 “TBI Among Service Members and Veterans.” CDC.gov. n.d., accessed Feb 15, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov (...)
- 18 Department of Veteran Affairs, “National Suicide Prevention Report, 2022,” September 2022, https:// (...)
- 19 The Wounded Warrior Project, “Annual Warrior Survey: Executive Summary,” 2021, https://www.woundedw (...)
- 20 Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture, (Routledge, 2010), 24-25.
- 21 Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc., 24-25.
- 22 Phil Strub to Larry Franco, “DoD Hulk Notes of Sunday, Feb 3,” Feb 3, 2002, 1. On file with the aut (...)
10Because each government agency wants to use its relationship with Hollywood to attract recruits, to justify larger budgets, or to showcase itself in a favorable manner in either contemporary or historical texts, the system, itself, cannot help but promote the corruption of the truth. Consider, for instance, that there are a list of scenes, images, and plot points that the Department of Defense refers to as “showstoppers” – elements that will nearly always make the military reject a script seeking its support. These showstoppers include depictions of friendly fire, representations of military or intelligence failures, weakness or incompetence, veteran drug use or addiction, soldiers suffering from PTSD, veteran suicides, sexual harassment by military personnel, and institutional racism inside of the military.15 These images run counter to the military’s recruitment and propaganda goals and thus will be rejected by the DOD if they appear in a script seeking its support. Films, including Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Rampage (Brad Peyton, 2018), Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001), Home of the Brave (Irwin Winkler, 2008) and The Tuskegee Airmen (Robert Markowitz, 1995), have all been denied assistance or were significantly altered because of these policies, but obviously, these issues are realities of combat and military service. For example, roughly one in five veterans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although the Department of Veteran Affairs puts that number as high as 29%.16 Only 6% of the civilian population, the VA states, experiences PTSD for comparison. Likewise, over 450,000 veterans have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries between 2000 and 2021,17 and roughly 17-18 service members commit suicide every day.18 In 2021, the Wounded Warrior project surveyed 156,000 wounded US veterans who have served post-9/11 and found high rates of PTSD, sleep disorders, anxiety and depression, in addition to hearing loss and muscle and joint injuries.19 Yet, as Stahl states in his monograph Militainment Inc., the DOD, by working to omit the physical and emotional tolls of war, finds itself instead advocating for what scholars term “clean wars” — wars in which the physical and psychological cost of battle are suppressed to make the cost of war more palatable for public consumption (and I would add to help boost recruitment).20 These efforts can range from forbidding journalists and photographers access to the areas where fallen soldiers’ coffins reenter the United States as the government did during the Iraq Wars21 to Pentagon officials insisting on scenes like one in the summer blockbuster Hulk (Ang Lee, 2003), where two military helicopters crash in the desert. The Pentagon demanded that a line in the script be added to make sure the pilots reported that they were essentially unharmed to again downplay the serious risks involved in combat missions.22 By omitting, suppressing, and whitewashing cinematic scenes, characters and dialogue it finds objectionable, the military-entertainment complex has historically worked to corrupt the truth about the nature and cost of war, in order to help in recruitment and its own propaganda efforts.
- 23 Tony Shaw and Tricia Jenkins, “From Zero to Hero: The CIA and Hollywood Today,” Cinema Journal 56, (...)
- 24 David Robarge, “Operation Argo in Book and Film,” Studies in Intelligence 57, no. 1, unclassified e (...)
- 25 Malcolm Byrne, ed., “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup,” National Security Archive Electronic Bri (...)
- 26 Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio, Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescu (...)
- 27 Robarge, “Operation Argo”.
11But corruption of the truth is not just about the cost of war; it also extends to issues of history, as government-assisted films often work to whitewash history in ways that are favorable to the cooperating agency. This is evidenced in films like the Oscar-winning Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012), which was heavily supported by the agency and centered around the 1970s Iranian hostage crisis and the CIA’s rescue of six Americans trapped inside of the country. As Tony Shaw and I demonstrate in our journal article “From Zero to Hero,”23 Argo was the direct result of a CIA public relations campaign, and while it might come across to many viewers as an apolitical, feel- good costume dramedy, the movie is also a strong advertisement for the CIA and rewrites history in the agency’s favor. For example, Argo buries or brushes over facts about the CIA’s role in prerevolutionary Iran that were unfavorable to the agency. The film opens with a two-minute storyboard prologue that was inserted by director Ben Affleck at a late stage of the production and was designed to show that the Iranian revolutionaries had some legitimate grievances against the United States. The prologue refers to the coup that the Americans and British engineered in 1953 to evict Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, whose nationalization of oil reserves threatened Western financial interests. The coup led to the return of the Shah, whose regime over the following decades became renowned for its opulence and oppression. After Argo was released, the CIA’s chief historian David Robarge criticized this prologue for rehashing myths about the 1953 coup and for not showing that the increasingly authoritarian Mossadegh had largely been thrown out of power by his own people.24 Documents now prove, however, that the CIA not only played an essential role in the 1953 coup but also provided vital advice and weapons to the Shah’s ruthless internal police, the SAVAK, for decades.25 Argo, however, makes no mention of this. Nor does it draw on the parts of Tony Mendez’s memoirs (Affleck plays Mendez in the film) that outline how in 1979 the CIA came up with a plan in which a dead body double for the Shah, who was then undertaking hospital treatment in the US for cancer but whom the revolutionaries wanted sent home for trial, would be used to arrange for the release of the fifty-three US hostages trapped in the embassy in Tehran.26 As Shaw and I write, Robarge argued that by incorporating these Mission: Impossible–like scenarios, Argo could have been “equally exciting” and “more truthful.”27 Actually, by leaving them out, and thereby distancing the CIA from the Shah’s discredited regime in the film, Affleck probably did the agency a service.
- 28 Tony Mendez, Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in CIA (New York: William Morrow, 1999).
12Argo also manufactures a dramatic climax during the movie’s exciting airport chase scene. During the actual operation back in 1980, the Americans’ cover story was never tested at the airport and in some ways proved irrelevant to their escape. Emigration officials barely looked at the Americans and their documentation as they passed smoothly through the airport, partly because the Iranian officials were not in fact pursuing them and were more interested in Iranian emigrants trying to flee the country with valuable goods in tow.28 In Argo, however, CIA officer Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) bravely opts to take the Americans to the airport, even though Washington has just canceled his mission in favor of a military rescue operation that would leave the Americans stranded. The fugitives are then detained and grilled by scowling Revolutionary Guards at the airport, who thoroughly vet their cover story before allowing them to pass. The Americans’ Swissair jet is then chased down the runway by furious gun-toting guards who have figured out the ruse, but too late. These changes made the film – which utilizes grainy Super 8 filmstock and actual news footage to lend itself a sense of historical accuracy – much more exciting, but it also had the effect of exaggerating the bravery, morality and derring-do of CIA officers like Mendez. More broadly, Argo also turns the CIA’s notorious failure to predict the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution — and the dangers in which this put Americans in Iran — into a story of joyful redemption. Rather than focusing on the 55 Americans who were held hostage for over a year, the film only focuses on the six Americans who were successfully and fairly quickly exfiltrated. A similar move was paralleled in Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) – another CIA-Hollywood collaboration – which focuses on the CIA’s successful bid to locate and kill Osama bin Laden rather than on the agency’s failure to anticipate 9/11. And Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are just several of the movies that work to white-wash or rewrite history in favor of a government entity. Others such as Blackhawk Down and Saving Jessica Lynch (Peter Markle, 2003) also work in this same vein, rewriting history to take a military or intelligence failure and to rewrite it as a redemptive success story.
- 29 Terence McSweeney, “A Black Panther for the New Millennium: Geopolitics in the Marvel Cinematic Uni (...)
- 30 McSweeney, “A Black Panther for the New Millennium,” 105.
- 31 Charles Blow, “My Very Own Captain America,” The New York Times, 29 July 2011, https://www.nytimes. (...)
13Indeed, other government-Hollywood collaborations have revised history even more boldly than Argo. For example, Marvel Studios rewrote World War II history in Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011), which the DOD collaborated on, to erase America’s history of racial segregation and Japanese internment camps during the conflict. During the first half of that film, Steve Rogers is employed by the USO to boost morale by performing for the servicemen stationed in Azzano, Italy in 1943. Shots of the crowd show black and white servicemen serving harmoniously alongside one another, while earlier shots in the film depict black and white Americans sharing recruitment stations and their children happily playing together on the streets. Later in the film, when Captain America forms his elite group of soldiers, known as the Howling Commandos, its members include Private Gabriel ‘Gabe’ Jones, an African-American with valuable linguistic skills, and a Japanese-American named Private ‘Jim’ Morita, who also served in the Army’s Nisei Squadron. As Terence McSweeney writes, these scenes are historically false: while “nearly a million African-Americans joined the armed forces in World War II in a variety of capacities,” they served in segregated units, were trained in separate facilities, and “even had separate blood supplies.”29 Likewise, all Japanese-American men who did not join the armed forces during the conflict “were automatically given 4C status as an ‘enemy alien,’” and those who did serve were “forbidden from being deployed in the Pacific Theatre, whereas no such restrictions were placed on Italian-Americans or German-Americans who fought on the Western Front.”30 The New York Times’ Charles Blow called the scenes of a fictitious integrated Army unsettling, noting that his grandfather was part of the 92 Infantry Division of “Buffalo Soldiers,” who fought in segregated units, under the command of “a known racist” who remained a military segregationist until his death.31 For Blow, the racial revisionism embodied by Captain America “illustrates just how quickly things can fade into the fog of history if not vigilantly and accurately kept alive in the telling,” and thus argues that the history of racial injustice “is not a thing to be toyed with,” even in escapist entertainment: “there are too many bodies at the bottom of that swamp to skim across it with such indifference. Attention must be shown. Respect must be paid.”
14As mentioned at the start of this paper, the term corruption has at least two meanings, and the other focuses on corruption as an improper behavior, often related to the taking or accepting of bribes to unfairly favor one party over another. Much of the Hollywood-entertainment complex fits this definition of corruption as well, especially when it comes to the Department of Defense. Because the DOD essentially works to sell its assets at a cut-rate price or even gives them away for free in exchange for favorable images of the military and the censorship of negative ones, its actions can be deemed as improper. Indeed, notions of censorship, infringing on artists’ creative visions, and only giving public resources to people that you like are often seen in Western, democratic societies as improper values and certainly not ones that should be funded with tax-payer money. Likewise, if a bribe is defined as an act to persuade someone to act in another’s favor by a gift of money or other inducement, the military-entertainment complex is guilty of this too. But note that Hollywood producers who change their scripts or accept DOD assistance are equally complicit in such corruption because in the government-entertainment complex, it is not the government that accepts the bribes or financial favors. It is in fact Hollywood that accepts the military’s bribes in exchange for their suppression of negative images, their rewriting of history, their promotion of false images, such as those of clean wars, and otherwise serving as a global vehicle for military and government propaganda.
- 32 “Payola and Sponsorship Identification,” The Federal Communications Commission, accessed July 1, 20 (...)
- 33 “Payola and Sponsorship Identification”.
15And while it might not deal with bribery or the selling of favors, specifically, there are a host of other ethical dilemmas and potentially improper behavior that are embedded in the government-entertainment complex that should not be ignored in any analysis of the topic. For example, organizations like the CIA are rarely credited in a film or television series for their cinematic support and even when these acknowledgements do appear, they are usually in small font near the very end of the scrolling credits. Proper and more prominent crediting of government influence though seems like the very least the public should demand, especially since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) already has similar laws in place. Section 507 of the Communications Act requires that when anyone “provides or promises to provide money, services or other consideration” to companies producing broadcasted material “that fact must be disclosed in advance of the broadcast.”32 Television and radio’s failure to disclose such payment or services is commonly referred to as “payola”' – a practice long considered as corrupt – and is punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than one year or both.33 This law was set in place to help the public critically consume media by allowing it to fully recognize the parties who exert influence on a text and producers’ motives for depicting something or someone in a flattering light. The same rules should apply to government-sponsored texts as they do to corporately-sponsored ones and to cinematic texts as well as broadcasted material.
- 34 Tom Hayden, “When the CIA Infiltrated Hollywood,” Salon.com, Feb 28, 2013, https://www.salon.com/20 (...)
- 35 Hayden, “When the CIA Infiltrated Hollywood”.
16This concept was reiterated by Tom Hayden, a California senator who first rose to fame as part of the Chicago Seven. He states that “Hollywood and government policymakers should consider labeling the sources of their product to make the audience beware what’s being sold. We have labels for tobacco products and all kinds of across-the-counter brands. Why not require a label stating, ‘The Central Intelligence Agency provided input and resources to this film. The CIA [or Pentagon] required certain alterations in the script. The final product was controlled by the film’s producers.’”34 He continues, is this “impractical or unreasonable? If you expect disclosure of the names of screenwriters or sources of a movie script, if ‘based on a true story’ is inserted in many a film, or for that matter, we disclose where the ingredients of food were grown, why not disclosure of any CIA role in contributing to a film?”35 To date, no such disclosures exist.
- 36 Abrams has argued many First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court, is the author of Speaking Fr (...)
- 37 Abrams, quoted in Robb, Operation Hollywood, 47.
- 38 Chermerinsky quoted in Robb, Operation Hollywood, 47.
17Finally, the government-entertainment complex may also violate US constitutional law, especially when it comes to the First Amendment. Famed Free Speech lawyer Floyd Abrams36 argues that the Hollywood-government complex violates filmmakers’ rights to free speech, as the First Amendment has long been interpreted to mean that the government cannot use its resources to favor one type of speech over another. Thus, “If the army says we will cooperate with some filmmakers, but only ones which please us because of the position [they take] about the armed forces,” that position is “clearly unconstitutional.”37 Former University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chermerinsky agrees; he asserts that “The Supreme Court has said that above all, the First Amendment means that the government cannot participate in viewpoint discrimination.”38 It “cannot favor some speech due to its viewpoint and disfavor another because of its viewpoint.” It stands to reason then that when the CIA, FBI or DOD says we will not help some filmmakers because of their depictions of us, while supporting other filmmakers because of their (differing) viewpoint it is quite possibly a breach of the First Amendment. Of course, one might argue that if the government had to assist every filmmaker who sought its assistance, this, too, would be an untenable position. Thus, in order for the government-entertainment liaison programs to adhere to the first amendment, the complex should perhaps be abandoned altogether.
18Sadly, however, the government’s relationship with Hollywood is unlikely to fade. Both parties benefit far too much to ever abolish it, and no one has ever challenged the system in a court of law. Likewise, this propaganda system serves a valuable role to governments in democratic societies. As Noam Chomsky argues, the leaders of totalitarian states can easily control public thought because the threat of violence is always present. “You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, and if they get out of line you smash them over the head,” he states.39 In more free and democratic societies, leaders lose that capacity. Therefore, they have to turn to the techniques of propaganda in order to manipulate public thought and opinions. “The logic is clear. Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”40 The primary creators of propaganda in a democracy, Chomsky continues, are the mass media and the multi-billion-dollar public relations industry, whose primary goal has always been to control public thought in order to increase their bottom line and strengthen their group’s influence in society. When mass media rely on the government for production benefits, however, both private and governmental interests are disseminated and the resulting products represent some of the most powerful forms of propaganda circulating in domestic and global culture.