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Comment by exarch | Hacker News Reader

"But is it propaganda? to me, it was more a way to please the audience."

That, or it's purely coincidental that "24" debuted following disclosure of Bush's torture programs, and "Person of Interest" debuted ahead of common knowledge of the extent of mass surveillance.

It may not be propaganda officially ordered and authored by some Ministry of Information, but it's the same thing no matter how many layers of abstraction it goes through: a way to shape the narrative and facts that inform the common person and allow them to form an understanding of an issue.

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"24" premiered in November 2001, and capitalized on the anti-terrorist sentiment in America after the September 11, 2011 attacks. The groundwork for Bush's "torture programs" were laid in late 2002, and came to public attention in June 2004, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

The interpretation that better reconciles the timeline is that both the show and the torture program are attempts to capitalize on the same public sentiment that led to this song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtesy_of_the_Red,_White_and_... (select lyrics: "Cause we'll put a boot in your ass; It's the American way"), peaking at #1 on Billboard's list of Hot Country Songs.

"24" only really turned into torture fetish material a few seasons in, though.

Yes. During season one, torture was a rare occurrence and was depicted in a rather morally ambiguous fashion. During the middle few seasons, heroic acts of torture featured on nearly every episode.

Remember also that producers of these shows often do have contact with members of the intelligence and defense communities who serve as official or unofficial advisors, at least so long as the depictions are acceptable to the establishment. Through these advisors, entertainment producers learn about secret programs long before the public. Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a particularly prominent recent example of how this works, and why it is a bad thing that results in "entertainment" which is very much a form of propaganda.

Season 2 of "24", which was full of torture scenes, aired a month after the famous "Torture Memos" were distributed, and long before the program was actually implemented. Of course it was written and filmed months before it aired. Your narrative is totally implausible.

Your premise that Season 2 was "full of torture scenes" (it was nothing compared to Season 4) is false. And anyway, the producers of shows like this (i.e. those with messaging deemed advantageously pro-establishment) are rewarded by said establishment by being connected in and obtain insider information.

I don't know whether Season 2 or Season 4 had more torture scenes, but there were enough in Season 2 (see: http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Interrogation) to make it unlikely that the show's general use of torture was not caused by any sort of information leaked by the "establishment." It simply predates the Bush torture program.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that the producers were rewarded after the fact, for the pro-torture message? And that encouraged them to make Season 4 even more torture filled? What sort of "insider information" did they get?

> Yes. During season one, torture was a rare occurrence and was depicted in a rather morally ambiguous fashion.

Portraying torture as merely "morally ambiguous" is arguably fairly strong pro-torture propaganda by the standards of anything but later editions of 24.

Fair point.

I don't know what happened in later seasons, I only watched the first few. There was torture in the show from Season 1. Jack violently interrogates two people in the first season, later executing one of them at the end of the season. Season 2 opens with a torture scene: http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Interrogation, one of many such scenes in that season.

I don't know how many people here really remember the mood back then. I was just starting college at Georgia Tech when Season 2 of "24" came on. It was hugely popular in my dorm. And the overall sentiment was pretty violent. In the run-up to the Iraq war the next year, it was less controversial to say that we should turn the middle east into a "glass parking lot" than to argue against going to war. And this is of course among people who were relatively liberal compared to the region as a whole.

They also have a torture page (edit: oops, I see now that it is just a redirect to Interrogation):

http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Torture

And an amputation page:

http://24.wikia.com/wiki/Amputation

(but a couple of those incidents don't involve torture; I remember being extremely put off by the scene in day 8 (I guess I switched it off before the scene was complete).

Now I wonder how mainstream 24 really is, given how over the top it seems.

It won 20 Emmy's and was pretty well-rated in its time.

I could/should have said something like "I wonder how prevalent approval for those depictions really is".

IIRC, season 4 was the torture season. It actually laid it on so thick, it became cartoon funny. Pretty sure that season caused some controversy and after that they toned it down a bit.

The show debuting right after the disclosure of torture programs is easily explainable. Writers frequently grab at whatever tasty bits of news or culture come along to provide themes and scenes for their works.

> "Person of Interest" debuted ahead of common knowledge of the extent of mass surveillance

By the way, I've got to hand it to Person of Interest for creating a show about technology and the singularity that isn't completely ridiculous with its use of computers and jargon. They're also not really pro-surveillance. To quote Finch:

"...the machine is... wonderful and terrible..."

It's also a show where bad guys (the government) are using torture, and it's horrific. On last night's episode they mutilated a main character just to make a point.

In a sense, I think PoI is somehow the spiritual successor of the X Files in a sense that it alternates between "monster of the week" (in this case: criminal of the week) and the big storyline which is about a corrupt and power-hungry government at every level from local city politicians all the way up to vast and limitless government agencies, and about everyone's love-hate-and-exploitation relationship with a superior intelligence (which was the aliens in X-Files).

It's a show that makes some powerful and ballsy statements, while at the same time keeping up the light entertainment of what's ostensibly a vigilante show.

I was surprised actually watching the show how ineffective the torture was. Once I started watching for it - in every single case using torture actually did get information out of the victim, but the information either came to late or was a red herring. I don't think they were trying to subtly undermine the justification for torture, but in that fictional world at least it was inevitably ultimately futile

> or was a red herring

As often in real life. There's this report from late 2006 (though I haven't checked any other sources)...

"Last week Omar Nasiri, a Moroccan who spent seven years infiltrating al-Qaeda as a double agent working for the French and British intelligence services, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that al-Qaeda deliberately fed false information to the US government in order to encourage it to invade Iraq. According to Nasiri (a pseudonym), Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and was captured in the US invasion of that country five years ago, told his US interrogators that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the terrorist organisation to plan attacks with chemical and biological weapons. [...] American forces had scooped up Ibn Sheikh al-Libi in Afghanistan in November, 2001, and sent him off to Egypt to be tortured (because the US itself doesn’t do torture) in the presence of American interrogators. And Libi told his lie about Saddam Hussein’s complicity with al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell seized on as justification for the US attack on Iraq."

(http://gwynnedyer.com/2006/al-qaeda-and-iraq/)

Whatever it all is, I have to admit it scares the crap out of me how much "victory at all costs" seems to be the moral and cultural norm these days when most people aren't even soldiers.

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