"Emotionally resonant media about real issues have changed public's perception. Researchers have found, for example, that ostensibly realistic films like Argo (depicting the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis) or Zero Dark Thirty (chronicling the search for Osama bin Laden) altered public opinion about those events. There is also evidence that such media can result in real world behavioral change in agents of the state. In his 2008 book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, Philippe Sands interviewed a former lawyer stationed at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who claimed that the television show 24 inspired interrogators to "go further than they otherwise might." The journalist Jane Mayer interviewed an Army interrogator in Iraq, who said that after people watched 24, they would "walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen." This is perhaps one reason why the Pentagon has collaborated with Hollywood since the early 20th century to create sympathetic portrayals on television and in film through the Entertainment Office—an arrangement often called the "military-entertainment complex." For television shows like 24 and films like American Sniper, the office will not only analyze the scripts for accuracy, it will also alter scripts to improve the portrayal of the military on screen. The Entertainment Office is in enough demand to be selective in what it will advise, reportedly turning down 95% of the scripts or story treatments it receives. "We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way," Captain Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera in 2014. This selectivity creates a powerful incentive for writers, producers, and directors to cede narrative ground to the Pentagon in order to secure access to their expertise, equipment, and approval."
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Joshua Foust, “Video games are the new contested space for public policy “, Brookings.edu, (March 25, 2021)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hollywood
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Hollywood
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