IS TELEVISION A PURE PROPAGANDA MACHINE?

In a country where separation of media and state is so valued, should a TV network allow a government agency to have an editorial role in how that agency is portrayed on the air?

The question is raised by the input and support CBS has accepted from the Central Intelligence Agency in producing its new weekly drama about the CIA, "The Agency," which premieres in September.

One wonders if CBS executives remember "The FBI," the dramatic series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. that was one of the great feats in propaganda history. Week after week for nine years, it presented an unvaryingly upbeat -- and largely distorted -- portrait of a highly ethical, non-politicized institution keeping America safe from internal and external enemies. It was a portrait jointly shaped by ABC, a private network, and the FBI, a secretive government agency that had say over scripts and story lines.

Each episode displayed the FBI seal and thanked director J. Edgar Hoover for his cooperation. As far back as the newsreels of John Dillinger's capture, Hoover knew that polishing the Bureau's image through the mass media was a key to ever more power and more funding.

After "The FBI" went off the air in 1973, Congressional hearings and Freedom of Information lawsuits revealed that -- during the nine years of sanitized hero-worship on ABC -- the Bureau was systematically abusing the First Amendment rights of countless civil rights and peace advocates, from grass roots activists to John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. "The FBI" offered no episodes about that FBI.

Zimbalist and his TV cohorts waged war against organized crime, but in the real world, the FBI's efforts were half-hearted at best. In 1968, for example, when activist/comedian Dick Gregory made a speech denouncing the Mafia as "snakes" for importing drugs into the inner city, J. Edgar Hoover reacted by trying to provoke the mob into retaliating against the comedian. Hoover wrote that the FBI should develop "a counterintelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory's attack on LCN."

Those dozen words shed more accurate light on the character and activities of the Bureau than all the weekly ABC episodes that year.

Apparently unconcerned with this history, CBS's "The Agency" has invited the participation of the CIA, an institution with a history at least as controversial as the FBI's. The CBS project readily won the support of the CIA and its public liaison officer with Hollywood, Chase Brandon, whose job is CIA image-enhancement.

A decade after the collapse of our Soviet enemy (which the CIA largely failed to predict), positive media presentations can help sell the public on the need for the CIA and its estimated $30 billion price tag. Each week "The Agency" will glorify CIA officers who save the world from Arab terrorists, drug-runners, kidnappers and assorted cutthroats.

A new ABC spy series, "Alias," has also received some CIA assistance, but Brandon refused requests to help two forthcoming CIA-related movies -- one starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt , another starring Matt Damon -- because he deemed them insufficiently positive: "If someone wants to slander us," Brandon told the Washington Post, "it's not in our interest to cooperate." Echoes of J. Edgar.

After meeting the creator of "The Agency" and reviewing scripts, Brandon granted unprecedented CIA support for the CBS series because "it would show our spirit, patriotism and dedication." As the New York Times described, CBS was even allowed to shoot parts of its pilot at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, using off-duty CIA employees as extras. For interior sets in Los Angeles, the CIA has provided agency seals. "Much to the delight of the agency," the Times reported, "CBS clearly has become an agency booster."

Series creator Michael Beckner explained CIA involvement to the Richmond Times-Dispatch: " is not going to demonize them…What attracted them to cooperating with us is the fact that we want to tell stories about the lives of the people that work there."

Producers say the CIA will have input on scripts but not script "approval." Executive Producer Shaun Cassidy commented on the CIA's script involvement : "Their support is a strictly case-by-case basis. If they don't like the script, we won't have their support that week."

But should network TV producers be showing scripts to a government agency in hopes of getting its support? And if a series is that cozy with its subject, how much integrity can the program have?

In recent years, the CIA has worked hand-in-hand with brutal regimes and armies. It has helped overthrow elected governments. CBS knows it will abruptly lose its access and support if "The Agency" focuses on the CIA's less savory activities or blunders.

As long as CBS and the CIA remain wedded, don't expect a hard-hitting episode on the agency's alliance with the corrupt, often-brutal military in Colombia. Or on the CIA's past links to terrorists like Osama bin Laden now protected by the Afghan government. Or on the agency's role in the bombings of the Chinese embassy in Serbia and the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

In other words, expect far more fiction than fact.

A version of this appeared in Newsday (9/4/01).

Disney has consistently spread pro-establishment messages in its films, particularly under subsidiary banners such as Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone Pictures (although Oliver Stone’s 1995 Nixon biopic is a notable exception). Several received generous assistance from the US government: the Pentagon-backed In the Army Now (1994), Crimson Tide (1995), and Armageddon (1998), as well as the CIA-vetted Bad Company (2002) and The Recruit (2003). In 2006, Disney released the TV movie The Path to 9/11, which was heavily skewed to exonerate the Bush administration and blame the Clinton administration for the terrorist attacks, provoking outraged letters of complaint from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger.

The nature of Disney’s output makes sense when we consider the interests of the higher echelons of the corporation. Historically, Disney has had close ties with the US defense department, and Walt himself was a virulent anti-communist (though reports about him being a secret FBI informant or even a fascist are rather more speculative). In the 1950s, corporate and government sponsors helped Disney make films promoting President Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” policy as well as the infamous Duck and Cover documentary that suggested to schoolchildren that they could survive an atomic attack by hiding under their desks. Even now, a longtime Directors Board member of Disney is John E. Bryson who is also a director of The Boeing Company, one of the world’s largest aerospace and defence contractors. Boeing received $16.6bn in Pentagon contracts in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan. This would have been no small incentive for Disney to avoid commissioning films critical of Bush’s foreign policy, such as Fahrenheit 9/11.

It is hardly surprising that when Disney released Pearl Harbor (2001) – a simplistic mega-budget movie made with full cooperation from the Pentagon, and which celebrated the American nationalist resurgence following that “day of infamy”– it was widely received with cynicism. Yet, despite lamentable reviews, Disney unexpectedly decided in August 2001 to extend the film’s nationwide release window from the standard two-to-four months to a staggering seven months, meaning that this ‘summer’ blockbuster would now be screening until December. In addition, Disney expanded the number of theatres in which the film was showing, from 116 to 1,036. For the corporations due to profit from the aftermath of 9/11, Pearl Harbor provided grimly convenient mood music...
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