I feel it’s more important to focus on the problem that we as a society are so easily influenced by Hollywood. Of course Hollywood is full of propaganda; they’re in the business of sensationalizing fiction. That’s literally their job. So what if the Pentagon manipulates Hollywood? That’s only a symptom of the much larger problem that Hollywood is treated as canon for how things really work in the “real world”. It never was and it never will be; especially those so-called “reality” TV shows.

We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that the more realistic our fiction is, the closer to real life it becomes. That in and of itself is the biggest lie we’ve been fed. Hollywood does this because we literally buy into it. They sell more fiction when it closely matches our expectations of reality.

Take the old reality TV show, The Hills. My now-ex wife used to watch this show when it first aired, and was so shocked at the series finale when the cast walked off into the sunset, only to have it be a backdrop of a Hollywood studio lot. That is the epitome of this propaganda machine.

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” – 1984

National Security Cinema is a good read. Coincidentally, CBC did a follow up piece to that article featuring Tom Secker: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-hollywood-turned-broken-men-into-heroes-after-the-vietnam-war-1.5570479

I stopped watching Hollywood garbage about four years ago. On the rare occasion I’m somewhere where something is on, the propaganda is super obvious.

I’m sure this isn’t the only group influencing culture like this.