CIA and Hollywood's Propagandic Collusion

Glenn Greenwald writes about the disturbing relationship between a CIA spokesperson Marie Harf and New York Times intelligence reporter Mark Mazetti.  Fellow NYT columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a piece that mentioned the collusion between the CIA and filmmakers working on a film that details the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and Harf was worried that the information implicating the CIA's relationship with the film would look poorly on the agency.  She contacted Mazetti, who then forwarded her the as-of-then unpublished column without consent or knowledge from the paper or Dowd, for her to review, but asked her to delete the email, since it seems he does have some sense of shame.  

While the media and the government often have a relationship that is too friendly to allow the media to properly act as a adversarial fourth estate, the new levels of collusion between filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal (the director and screenwriter for "The Hurt Locker," respectively) and the CIA are disturbing, especially since the film was originally scheduled to be released in October, just before the presidential election.  As Judicial Watch has reported:

According to a June 15, 2011, email from Benjamin Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Doug Wilson, then-CIA Director of Public Affairs George Little, and Deputy White House Press Secretary Jaime Smith, the Obama White House was intent on “trying to have visibility into the UBL (Usama bin Laden) projects.”

Compare the treatment of Laura Poitras, a documentarian whose last two films, "My Country, My Country" and "The Oath," have been critical of the United States foreign policy.  She is routinely harassed at airports when she enters the country, questioned by the TSA and FBI agents, and has her electronic equipment seized without a warrant.

This is all par for the course.  Instead of making Washington more transparent, and therefore more accountable as he promised, Obama and his administration have rewarded people who give favorable treatment to the administration with access, sometimes to classified information, while punishing whistle- blowers with harassment and sometimes even prosecution.

Now imagine if this would have happened sometime in 2006, when Bush was still in the White House.  I can almost guarantee that Democrats and liberals would be up in arms about this sort of corruption.  But now that it is their man as the commander-in-chief, most could not care at all.