Hollywood's most dangerous propaganda machine
It's isn't woke-ism.
In recent years, “Hollywood propaganda” has come to mean entertainment that promotes left-wing, woke, or liberal ideology. Ask many people on “the right,” and they will tell you this is the core of Hollywood’s rot.
Liberal Hollywood injecting their often self-congratulatory expressions of political and cultural ideology into television shows and movies is no doubt problematic. But it’s not the most insidious propaganda from the entertainment industry. Despite the right’s disdain for Hollywood’s woke agenda, the roots of propaganda in film and television are much deeper and far less commonly known.
Hollywood goes to war
For over a century, the US government has had a hand in the film industry.
The Committee on Public Information (CPI), the war propaganda department that employed famed propagandist Edward Bernays early in his career, produced its own films. The CPI’s “Division of Films,” created through an executive order from Woodrow Wilson, made pro-war films like America’s Answer and Pershing’s Crusaders. It also contracted out other war films. By 1927, the military was working with Hollywood to retroactively glorify the US military’s involvement in WWI, helping produce Wings, a silent film about WWI fighter pilots. Additionally, the US Army relied on its Signal Corps, which made “documentary” films about troops at war.
This was only the tip of the iceberg. In World War II, the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures partnered with Hollywood to make pro-America, pro-war films. This office regarded Hollywood as “an essential war industry,” and for good reason: the OWI’s director, Elmer Davis, reportedly said that “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”
In the same era, Disney produced war films for every branch of the military. The Signal Corps remained active, enlisting Hollywood director Frank Capra to make a series of propaganda films called Why We Fight.
During the Cold War, the Pentagon established its own media office, the Motion Picture Production Branch (sometimes referred to as the Motion Picture Production Office), to maintain influence and assess which Hollywood scripts were worthy of military support. One executive producer at Universal Studios wrote to the director of the MPPB in 1975, “We are receptive to any input the services might give us for potential stories.”
Today, the Department of War runs the Community Engagement Office through its Public Affairs division (it appears to have recently changed the name from the “Entertainment Media Office”). In addition, each branch of the military runs an entertainment office. While the military officially claims they work with Hollywood to ensure accuracy and protect sensitive information, the Pentagon also enjoys editorial influence over the films they oversee.
This includes having a say over scripts in exchange for access to military equipment and expertise. If filmmakers don’t comply with the Pentagon’s narratives, they do not win support. This was the case with the famous Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola failed to secure military support. Other films that failed to earn Pentagon backing include Independence Day, Forrest Gump, Dr. Strangelove, and Platoon. An internal memo noted that the military rejected Forrest Gump because the film gave “the generalised impression that the army of the 1960s was staffed by the guileless or by soldiers of limited intelligence.”
