Billboard.com
By Marc Schneider
July 31, 2015
It doesn’t exactly rise to the level of Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, but a new batch of Pentagon documents showing the military’s keen interest in Hollywood has still raised a few eyeballs. A recent FOIA request by SpyCulture.com’s Tom Secker produced about 1,400 pages of documents from the U.S. Army’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs (OCPA-West) -- which acts as a liaison between the entertainment industry and the Army.
Unsurprisingly, the documents show highly organized efforts by the military to cultivate positive relationships with Hollywood studios in the making of films and television. Some of the data is essentially a spreadsheet of ongoing projects, like a request to allow Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe to shoot footage at Fort Hood, or noting that several non-commissioned officers had just appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen.
In another document, the Army seemed genuinely bummed at the ouster of a season 10 American Idol contestant who was also a PSYOP (psychological operations) specialist based out of Fort Bragg. “Unfortunately she was voted off the show late last week during filming in Hollywood,” the entry said. The singer-soldier’s name is redacted and the Army goes on to list several positives of the show, such as ratings and international reach. Idol even visited Fort Bragg to “tape her participating in an airborne operation and to shoot interviews with her.”
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From Spyculture
This is only one branch of the US military, the Army. The Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and National Guard all have their own Entertainment Liaison Offices. While the Army is perhaps the busiest in terms of involvement in the entertainment industry, we can be confident that the scale of the overall DOD involvement is at least double the size of what these Army documents reveal. I have filed requests with the Navy and the Marine Corps for similar reports but so far no luck.
Today the Daily Mirror (technically their Sunday paper the Sunday People) published an article mentioning these documents but failing to mention my name. To be clear, I submitted the request as the result of conversations with academic Matt Alford, who pressed the Mirror into publishing the article. As per usual, you can’t trust the mainstream media to get a story straight.
