Image 01 Image 03

Media Bias Has Hollywood Rewriting History

Media Bias Has Hollywood Rewriting History

Hollywood’s true stories are revised to promote a political agenda.

http://www.datacenterjournal.com/ministry-truth-language-obamas-nsa-reform-speech/

The renewed attention on media bias since the Washington Post cartoon about Ted Cruz’s children reminded me of Kyle Smith’s December 14, 2015, review of Bridge of Lies in Commentary.

Smith writes that Hollywood loves “based on a true story” scripts for their emotional draw and their putative lessons about our society.  But all too often those lessons really aren’t what Leftist Hollywood wants them to be, so movie makers change the facts to comport with their view of the world.

Smith describes how several Oscar-hopefuls amended reality to fit the liberal narrative.  Imitation Game is based on the life of Englishman Alan Turing, a genuine hero of the Western world whose decryption work at Bletchley Park was indispensable to winning WWII and the creation of the computer age.

The true story is that in 1952 Turing reported a burglary to the police, but lied about some details to hide his homosexual relationship.  As the police investigated and the inconsistencies became apparent, Turing ultimately admitted the truth.  He was convicted of gross indecency and chemically castrated.  It was terrible, barbaric and unjust treatment of a national and civlizational hero.

But the writers of Imitation Game, felt compelled to hide that Turing lied to police.  Instead, they invented a Soviet spy ring that blackmailed Turing with his sexual preference.

Turing no doubt felt compelled to lie about his sexuality due to the laws and social norms of the time and in the circles where he traveled. The tension between being true to himself and hiding to conform and keep his station is a worthwhile topic.  But Hollywood needed an unblemished martyr.
In Kill The Messenger, Gary Webb gets the hero treatment for his articles in the San Jose Mercury claiming the CIA was responsible for the crack epidemic in California.  According to Smith, Kill the Messenger portrays Webb as “a martyr to the truth undone by jealous rivals rather than his own egregiously flawed work.”

In real life, Webb’s work has been widely discredited, as he overstated his meager evidence and exaggerated the implications of what he actually had.  But admitting this reality undermines the Leftist conspiracy theory that the government (and the satanic CIA no less!) is culpable for urban drug abuse.

In Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo is imprisoned and blackballed from Hollywood after admitting to being a Communist in a great oratory before The House Un-American Activities Committee.  In reality, Trumbo was called before HUAC and immunized, meaning that he faced no consequences for answering questions and was not entitled to assert his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.  Trumbo nevertheless refused to answer questions and was convicted of contempt of Congress.

A film about a craven refusing to answer questions before Congress is not compelling; a film about government persecution of a man for speaking his beliefs is.  So reality changes.

Hollywood knows that changing one fact or one part of a story can have a huge impact on history’s lessons.  The public revolt against West Germany’s conservative government that birthed Germany’s current progressivism began when a policeman named Karl-Heinz Kurras shot unarmed protester Benno Ohnesorg in 1967.  The image of this establishment brute murdering progressive youth drove a movement.

Benno

Benno Ohnesorg Lays Dying

But it was a set-up.  In 2009, Kurras was revealed as an agent for East Germany’s notorious secret police, the Stasi.  The New York Times reported:

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”

Potent stuff.

And that’s the point.  Hollywood is going back in time and transmogrifying history into perfect leftist morality plays.  If this reminds you of the Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, you’re not far off.

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

“It was terrible, barbaric and unjust treatment of a national and civlizational hero.”

Not really. Not at all.

Turing entered a plea of guilty.[107] The case, Regina v. Turing and Murray, was brought to trial on 31 March 1952,[108] when Turing was convicted and given a choice between imprisonment and probation, which would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted the option of treatment via injections of stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen; this treatment was continued for the course of one year. The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused gynaecomastia,[109] fulfilling in the literal sense Turing’s prediction that “no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out”.[110][111] Murray was given a conditional discharge.[112]

    Ragspierre: Not really. Not at all.

    Yes, punishing people with either prison or chemical castration for being a homosexual was both barbaric and unjust.

      Ragspierre in reply to Zachriel. | December 27, 2015 at 4:15 pm

      No, stupid. You don’t understand the meaning of either word, just your own prejudices.

        Milhouse in reply to Ragspierre. | December 27, 2015 at 11:32 pm

        Um, what do you call it then?

        Not that Turing makes a great martyr. He could easily have avoided prosecution if he’d just taken the trouble to hide the evidence from the police; he refused to do this, not out of admirable principle but because he was convinced that his class status made him immune from the law. His status would indeed have made the police pretend not to find out about him, if only he had made that possible for them; but when he gave them no choice they brought charges, and from there his fate was unstoppable.

        None of this makes the law of the time any more just or less barbaric. Indeed not very long afterwards it was recognised as unjust and barbaric, and repealed.

Sammy Finkelman | December 27, 2015 at 1:56 pm

What these people are really lying about is history – what the situation was at the time.

Communists did not admit to being Communists. I guess it was either having Trumbo admit it defiantly, or say he wasn’t, and the first choice is at least closer to the truth.

Blackmail was the reason given for denying security clearances, but it didn’t happen much.

It was actually a standard “cover” for people involved with organized crime in the 1980s – this was also what people involved in the Savings and Loan Scandal did – to claim to be working for the CIA. They used, so-to-speak “CIA cover”

Hollywood has ruined many a good story by changing the facts. It is what Hollywood does. The better plan would have been to tell the story accurately. Lying eventually comes back to bite the liar.

“If this reminds you of the Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, you’re not far off.”

Not far off? The only difference is that Hollywierd is doing this voluntarily and not by government edict (although, given some recent headlines…).

In the words of one of the left’s own, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.’

Char Char Binks | December 27, 2015 at 2:18 pm

BASED on a true story means NOT a true story.

    Based on a true story, one or more of the characters really existed, one or more of the events happened, but not necessarily in the way portrayed. Sort of like the movie “The Bowe Bergdahl story” (I don’t KNOW if someone is doing it, but it wouldn’t surprise me)

Politics is downstream of culture. That’s why controlling the narrative is so important to the left. One way street. Left turns only.

Liberals do not believe in learning from history – they believe that history needs to learn from them.

    “Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it; those who fail to learn history correctly – why, they are simply doomed.” – Achem Dro’hm, “The Illusion of Historical Fact”, C.Y. 4971 (Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, “To Loose the Fateful Lightning”, season 1, episode 3)

While It’s true about Hollywood, don’t be so quick to think that the ‘powers that be’ aren’t above manufacturing ‘evidence’ as well.
In israel, there is a video purportedly showing ‘hilltop youth’ stabbing photos of baby at a wedding –
– see –
About that wedding dance….
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2015/12/about-that-wedding-dance.html#links

    Thank you for that. That’s important information (if true, of course, but it’s certainly in character for Shabak, so it seems likely to be true).

Jonathan Levin: A film about a craven refusing to answer questions before Congress is not compelling

Risking prison rather than testify against others for their political beliefs is hardly “craven”. Trumbo was convicted of contempt of Congress. He said it was just, though, as he really had contempt for Congress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u93bhAimFFU

    Ragspierre in reply to Zachriel. | December 27, 2015 at 4:11 pm

    Some things are overlooked, of course, such as Dalton’s slavish loyalty to Stalin from the late 1930s until the Caligula in the Kremlin died in 1953. Stalin may not have been perfect, Trumbo would later admit, while insisting that the serial killer in Moscow had done wonders as he “preserves, maintains and develops” socialism.

    His embrace of Adolf Hitler is also nicely airbrushed. During the 22 months of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Dalton sided with the Fuehrer as he attacked Poland, stormed across Western Europe and then blitzed London in preparation for a cross-channel invasion. Dalton mobilized his polemical skills to ease Hitler’s burden of conquest by demonizing his enemies and insisting that England was just not worthy of assistance.

    He even accused FDR of “treason” and “black treason” for aiding the British in their hour of peril. That was the party line from Moscow, which Dalton emphatically echoed. Not until the Nazis marched on Russia in 1941 did he find the German warlord a major disappointment.

    -snip-

    Channeling his inner Stalin, he also wrote a screenplay — egged on by some of his Hollywood Ten friends — in which the major character, Catherine Bonham, reveals her ardent attachment to North Korea. Bonham insists Kim’s country is a “model” Asian nation and is fighting for its freedom “just as we had to fight for our own independence in 1776.”

    The authentic Trumbo, not the Botoxed movie version, used his inexhaustible supply of energy to advance not the First Amendment but totalitarian Communism. He secretly joined the Kremlin-controlled Communist Party in 1943 but conceded to biographer Bruce Cook in the 1970s that he “might as well have been a Communist ten years earlier” and that he “never regretted it.” He loved the party so much that, after serving a prison term for contempt of Congress and a sojourn in Mexico, he “reaffiliated with the Party in 1954” and then left the party in 1956.

    For approximately two decades, Trumbo was secretly working for the Evil Emperor. But his pro-Soviet views were hardly hidden when in 1945 he became editor of The Screen Writer, the official publication of the powerful Screen Writers Guild, transforming that influential monthly into a virtual Red propaganda organ, with the aid of CP members Gordon Kahn (managing editor) and Harold J. Salemson (editorial secretary). Virtually everything Red was celebrated, including Communist lectures, Communist obituaries, the Soviet film industry, Red-run unions and guilds, party screenwriters and even Stalin himself.

    By 1947, Americans knew that Stalin was our deadly enemy. But Dalton and the rest of his Hollywood Ten crew were colluding with the Kremlin to do this country in, which the much maligned HUAC proved beyond reasonable dispute. For this reason only, the studios blacklisted those Soviet fifth columnists who worked long and hard and covertly for a Stalinist America.

    ______________________________________________

    Proving, yet again, there is no Progressive monster you will not defend with your happy horseshit.

      Ragspierre: Channeling his inner Stalin

      Turns out that, in the U.S. of A., the government can’t persecute you for your political beliefs. See Yates vs. The United States.

        Ragspierre in reply to Zachriel. | December 28, 2015 at 10:25 am

        Another falsehood. It all depends on “passive versus active”.

        But Trumbo was not fired by the U.S. government. Was he,
        liar?

        And he wasn’t falsely persecuted for “political beliefs”, but correctly for being a Collectivist who worked for the Stalinist overthrow of the United States. Wasn’t he, liar?

          Ragspierre: But Trumbo was not fired by the U.S. government.

          No, but he was being forced to inform on people who would be persecuted for their political beliefs.

          Ragspierre: And he wasn’t falsely persecuted for “political beliefs”, but correctly for being a Collectivist who worked for the Stalinist overthrow of the United States. Wasn’t he

          No. He was prosecuted for refusing to testify, for not naming names.

          Ragspierre in reply to Ragspierre. | December 28, 2015 at 11:15 am

          He was convicted of contempt of Congress, liar.

          Ragspierre: He was convicted of contempt of Congress

          That’s right. He refused to testify so was prosecuted for contempt of Congress.

          Ragspierre in reply to Ragspierre. | December 28, 2015 at 12:23 pm

          And he wasn’t falsely persecuted for “political beliefs”, but correctly for being a Collectivist who worked for the Stalinist overthrow of the United States. Wasn’t he, liar?

          And he refused to testify in defense of his Stalinist co-conspirators. So he was appropriately found in contempt of Congress. Just as he would have been as part of a Nazi cell during WWII.

          Milhouse in reply to Ragspierre. | December 28, 2015 at 3:01 pm

          No, but he was being forced to inform on people who would be persecuted for their political beliefs.

          Really? In what way would they have been persecuted by the government? Of course they would have been shunned by all decent people, as they should have been. And they would have been investigated to see whether they’d broken any laws, such as espionage. And they would have been lost any security clearances they might have held, and removed from any sensitive positions. What’s your objection to any of that?

          Here’s the basic question that underlies everything else: Do you accept that there is no moral difference whatsoever between a nazi and a communist? If you don’t accept that then there is no point in further discussion.

          Ragspierre: And he wasn’t falsely persecuted for “political beliefs”, but correctly for being a Collectivist who worked for the Stalinist overthrow of the United States.

          No. He was prosecuted for refusing to testify against others about their political beliefs.

          Milhouse: Do you accept that there is no moral difference whatsoever between a nazi and a communist?

          They are both extremist positions in that they both held that the ends justify the means. Nazis believed in extinguishing people because of their race, while communists believed in the destruction of the class system, the latter allowing for reeducation, at least in principle.

          The courts have ruled that espousing the opinion that the U.S. system is doomed by historical necessity to be overthrown is not criminal. Only acting with “clear and present danger” against the U.S. government is criminal.

          [on the House Un-American Activities Committee] “They’ll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem.” — Humphrey Bogart

          Ragspierre in reply to Ragspierre. | December 28, 2015 at 4:36 pm

          “They are both extremist positions in that they both held that the ends justify the means. Nazis believed in extinguishing people because of their race, while communists believed in the destruction of the class system, the latter allowing for reeducation, at least in principle.”

          Trumbo would have killed you for that, had he had his way.

          But you just show how you use your happy de minimus horseshit to excuse any Collectivist monster.

          Again. It’s really about your only trick, and you’ve been busted.

          Milhouse in reply to Ragspierre. | December 28, 2015 at 10:43 pm

          The courts have ruled that espousing the opinion that the U.S. system is doomed by historical necessity to be overthrown is not criminal.

          Of course. And nor is it criminal to espouse the policies of National Socialism. It’s not even criminal to calmly espouse the opinion that the USA ought to be overthrown by force, that the president ought to be assassinated, that slavery ought to be reintroduced, or anything else. The first amendment protects all of those. But how is that relevant? The people Trumbo was required by law to name would not have faced criminal charges for their opinions. They would have faced investigation for possible crimes, loss of security clearances and sensitive positions, and public opprobrium, exactly as they should have, and exactly as a Nazi or a Christian Dominionist would. What’s your objection to that?

          Milhouse: The people Trumbo was required by law to name would not have faced criminal charges for their opinions.

          Claiming they wouldn’t be persecuted is facile. Forcing people to testify against one another, to “name names”, concerning personal political beliefs, is corrosive to liberty and democracy. The perspective of history has rendered it an overreach of government power and coercion.

Read good books and forget entertainment the catalyst for mental impotency.

Wait till ya see what they do to the movie about Benghazi due to be released next year.

Hillary missed the National Security meeting the next day because she’d spent the night dodging snipper fire while trying to save the Ambassador from the attack. The killers were angered because of the video that was playing on all the cable stations and drive-ins in the middle east