The Pentagon Goes Hollywood

The Pentagon's relationship to Hollywood is hardly monolithic, although filmmakers who go native are often refused support, like Francis Coppola with his excellent Apocalypse Now.

Truthdig is hosting an interesting article on the conscription of popular imagination with The Pentagon Goes Hollywood by Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. The TomDispatch author interview is below.

Unfortunately, this excerpt article makes no mention of Jack Valenti and his infamous support for propaganda injection. Few of us remember which filmmakers volunteered to sprinkle their films with propaganda, even for recent projects after the September 11 attacks. For additional details see The Boston Globe series "Hollywood Goes to War," "Collateral Brain Damage? The Hollywood Propaganda Ministry" at Ratical, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, and "The Manufacture of World Order: The Security Services and the Movie Industry" at Media/Culture Journal.

Information Anxiety

I used to read Search Engine Watch but got bored. That's changed because Read/WriteWeb (a Web 2.0 blog) made search engines interesting with regular Top 100 Alternative Search Engines lists. Sure Google destroyed Altavista and now rules, but they're not that strong on information design and will have to innovate like everyone else to be able to filter the explosion of multimedia, location, and other information now available. It's not just a matter of semantics.

Not incidentally Read/WriteWeb also has a good post on Mozilla and the future of the browser, which looks at recent presos from Mozilla designers, as well as commentators concerned with an open web and stuff in the works from Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, etc. This really is a concern because of neocon Rupert Murdoch's News Corpse statements about further consolidation by the oligarchs: Peter Chernin and the Time Warner CEO weren't talking about Dow Jones/WSJ but Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon.