Sounds more like calculated BS to make a backwards country in the middle of nowhere sound like a credible threat to anything...
Then you have all the movies and tv series, which, without any hint of irony, show "spies" and the like from such countries, operating in the US (and with full teams and equipment), even infiltrating the secret agencies and such.
So you have uneducated people from rural fly-over country that cannot even pin-point Germany on the map, believe what they see in those series, not as an actual fact, but as something that could potentially happen or is credible. (Just imagine what the kind of people who think evolution is bad for school curriculum believe about foreign countries).
To convey the BS-detection levels a European feels, consider a report were Inuits are the major threat and Inuit operatives are preparing an attack on the US, hacking networks, and the like... Or maybe Mexico, or Canada... (This BS doesn't work as well when it's about a place you know, that you might have visited and that's close to home, right? Whereas anybody can imagine any kind of BS for some remote third world place with 1/1000 the resources).
(Of course there are people that watch non-ironic action movies were the President bare-handedly fights the bad guys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One_%28film%29#Plot !!! We might watch them for the special fx and action scenes in Europe, but we call them typical hollywood BS and use huge tons of irony about them).
I've stopped watching shows like Homeland, Person of Interest, 24 (only saw like 3 seasons), etc a while ago. The level of US propaganda in them made them unbearable to watch.
Homeland was pretty subversive in its first season, I mean, up until Brody decided not to blow himself and the rest of the high-ranking officials up in that bunker it was a pretty bleak affair: a decorated US marine, now a politician, who decides to kill the VP of the United States and a couple of other generals, you don't usually get that in block-busters. Afterwards, and especially starting with season 2, it did indeed become a propaganda thingie.
Otherwise you're completely spot on. As a film junkie it really bothers me that our generation doesn't have its "Apocalypse Now", "The Deer Hunter" or "Rambo I - First Blood" (whose director has just been interviewed in the latest Cahiers du Cinema issue), it's all white-washed, depressing propaganda. There are a few exceptions here and there (De Palma's "Redacted", Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker", partially), but otherwise we're treated not as adults, but as kids who need to be told "nice" stories about what's really happening around us.
How is Person of Interest propagandized? The first couple of seasons are about a secret government program designed to spy on everyone in the world, a black ops unit that assassinates American citizens, and a group of corrupt NYPD officers. The later seasons don't have much at all to do with the government.
Except the major theme was if it was a closed system vs. an open one. The machine in the show would probably be constitutional given that it goes to a significant length to protect people's privacy.
spoilers...you obviously haven't been watching this season homeland. The cia is backing a known taliban "terrorist" and the US is made to look weak, disjointed, and behind the ball.
Which is still a classic old Hollywood BS distortion.
The US hasn't been "weak" compared to anything since the USSR collapsed, and probably not even when it existed.
The US shown as "weak, disjointed, and behind the ball" is the classic tactic to show that some lame figure is a "credible enemy", so that any pre-emptive attack or move is justified -- since we're talking about "capable enemies" that could really damage the country.
It's akin to putting a gun on the hands of some black kid the police shot, to make him look more threatening that he was.
> Sounds more like calculated BS to make a backwards country in the middle of nowhere sound like a credible threat to anything...
Except it's an established fact that North Korea has considerable cyberwarfare capabilities, nothing that needs to be fabricated either with this hacking or in pop culture.
Who would do this and for what reason? The CIA can be batshit insane, but nobody ever would sign off on making millions in damage to a movie company to make an already evil country look more evil.
Your post is 90% "murricans are dumb" and 10% baseless accusations.
I have a theory that even the movies and shows which don't have rather obvious nationalistic, patriotic, or propaganda agendas have essentially deranged most Americans' minds to a point where they / we make decisions and support things based on a false, delusional set of parameters. Junk in, junk out.
Then you have all the movies and tv series, which, without any hint of irony, show "spies" and the like from such countries, operating in the US (and with full teams and equipment), even infiltrating the secret agencies and such.
So you have uneducated people from rural fly-over country that cannot even pin-point Germany on the map, believe what they see in those series, not as an actual fact, but as something that could potentially happen or is credible. (Just imagine what the kind of people who think evolution is bad for school curriculum believe about foreign countries).
To convey the BS-detection levels a European feels, consider a report were Inuits are the major threat and Inuit operatives are preparing an attack on the US, hacking networks, and the like... Or maybe Mexico, or Canada... (This BS doesn't work as well when it's about a place you know, that you might have visited and that's close to home, right? Whereas anybody can imagine any kind of BS for some remote third world place with 1/1000 the resources).
(Of course there are people that watch non-ironic action movies were the President bare-handedly fights the bad guys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One_%28film%29#Plot !!! We might watch them for the special fx and action scenes in Europe, but we call them typical hollywood BS and use huge tons of irony about them).