Zap wrote:.....
the Law of Unintended Consequences is pretty much guaranteed to ruin the ROI of the incredible amount of time/money the CIA would have spent attempting to subtly sway the nation's minds.
Nonsense. Are you suggesting there's no reason for Voice of America or the advertising industry? Billions are spent to push mere consumer goods. What do you think selling a government or an ideology is worth?
Movies and TV make gobs of profits. Just like
other CIA drugs.
So merely writing scripts or finding useful ones to polish up a bit and market is a win-win for propagandists and industry.
There's open source figures from the past on the many millions to billions the CIA spends on media. Because media propaganda - controlling information to influence attitudes - is its main function, not spying.
This has been exposed by ex-CIA whistleblowers like Ralph McGehee back in 1982.
This goes back to WWII. If you think there was such thing as WWII and it wasn't just "the universe winking at us."
(such as trying to discredit a little known JFK investigator by starting a television show featuring a hoodlum character named "Fonzie" - only to have said character become one of the most beloved characters ever on television ... even if anyone subconsciously made the connection between the names, I think the "loveable rebel with a heart of gold" connotation would work strongly against the CIA's alleged goal ...)
Mere fictionalization is enough to displace the real target, Gaeton Fonzi, in the game theory of keyword marketing.
Framing as negative or positive is additional to the main strategy of occlusion.
Back when 'Happy Days'
(name of a CIA porn film to smear a target, BTW, a title hijacking) was on the air...everyone knew about-

...and NOBODY, certainly not recruitable
kidz, knew how much was known about the inside job murder of their president but they were concerned about 'who shot J.R. in Dallas' -
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiv ... t5833.html"According to Fonzi, WerBell was already the go-to guy for suppressed firearms in the early to mid-1950s, when his handiwork was already covertly used in what they used to call Indo-China. By WerBell's own admission, he was involved in some capacity in the attempts on Castro's life in the early '60s. "I was sittin' in Miami with a goddamned million dollars in cash for the guy who was gonna take Fidel out," he told Fonzi, who doesn't expound further. However, minimal logic would seem to indicate that if he was already involved in those attempts, even if only as a lowly courier of funds, it would be stupid not to also utilize the expertise he'd already demonstrated by using his weapons for the job of offing Castro. Fonzi seems to give him a pass on personal involvement in the assassination, but when one manufactures assassination-specialized weapons for a living, who knows what happens to those weapons once they've been delivered to the client? Then again, WerBell may have been happy to admit being a mule for the funds, but less sanguine about admitting that he also provided the weaponry for the job. Given the subsequent events in Dallas that Fonzi was pressing him for information on, WerBell may have intuited that any admission to having supplied weapons to kill Castro could implicate him in Dallas too."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_shot_J.R.%3F
