Whatever It Takes
By Jane Mayer
The New Yorker

19 February 2007 Issue

The politics of the man behind "24."

The office desk of Joel Surnow-the co-creator and executive producer of "24," the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox-faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago, Surnow received it as a gift from an Army regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers had shared a collection of "24" DVDs, he told me, until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. "The military loves our show," he said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a "soul patch" - a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He's got it down. "People in the Administration love the series, too," he said. "It's a patriotic show. They should love it."

Surnow's production company, Real Time Entertainment, is in the San Fernando Valley, and occupies a former pencil factory: a bland, two-story industrial building on an abject strip of parking lots and fast-food restaurants. Surnow, a cigar enthusiast, has converted a room down the hall from his office into a salon with burled-wood humidors and a full bar; his friend Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host, sometimes joins him there for a smoke. (Not long ago, Surnow threw Limbaugh a party and presented him with a custom-made "24" smoking jacket.) The ground floor of the factory has a large soundstage on which many of "24"'s interior scenes are shot, including those set at the perpetually tense Los Angeles bureau of the Counter Terrorist Unit, or C.T.U. - a fictional federal agency that pursues America's enemies with steely resourcefulness.

Each season of "24," which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer - a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland-must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process - allowing a terrorist plot to proceed - or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022607H.shtml

Much more at link.

This entire show is propaganda. It has terrible consequences for the people we capture. The torture is being copied by our interrogaters with deadly results. People actually believe torture works for us as it does in the program.

Some of us are sick, sick, sick...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022707S.shtml

After interrogators began torturing Iraqi prisoners using methods they saw on Fox TV's popular "24," the Army's Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan warned the producers "24" is negatively impacting the training and performance of American troops.

Finnegan, dean of the US Military Academy at West Point, accompanied by veteran military and FBI interrogators, met with the "24" creative team in Southern California last November to tell them, "I'd like them to stop. They should do a show where torture backfires," according to an article in the February 19-26 issue of The New Yorker by Jane Mayer. The "24" show is said to have a weekly audience of fifteen million viewers, and it reaches millions more through DVD sales.

Problem is, propaganda works. Advertising works. Same thing.

We are systematically fed what advertisers and propagandists want us to believe, and now we are a nation of fat, uninformed, cruel people. Even comedy is mean now. And we are so mislead we are not even aware of how brutish we have become.

Heaven help the people who have managed to remain compassionate through all this dreck.

When we hear children are torturing other children, real or mockingly, like they recreate the wrestling moves they see, we will know the damage has penetrated to the extremes of our society- Just as intended.

I had respect for Donald Sutherland but this Kiefer is such a lowlife scum. Anything for money when they fall from the spotligght. Why is it Americans pick foreigners to play their heros in their violent extremist movies? I'm thinking of Mel Gibson, an aussie playing "The Patriot" here. Why not pick an American actor for these parts. That movie was BBBBBaaaaaaaaad, just sucked. More propaganda, hero creating fluff.

I use my discretion to change the channel when I find something objectionable. I have never seen one episode of this trash, and I plan to keep it that way.

I agree, DO.g's...so much could be done by celebrities to stop much of what the Bushies have done to America and to the world, and many celebrities are doing all they can to help...the Dixie Chicks, Barbra Streisand, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, just to name a few. Others, like Keifer Southerland, are indeed too selfish to think past their paychecks. America elected an actor to be POTUS, and right now an actor raised in Austria is in the CA governor's mansion...America really listens to its celebrities, and they have an immense influence on the fate of our nation, now more than ever.

Like you, I will never watch an episode of the "24" trash, and I also choose to turn the channel. Lately the OFF button on my remote gets more use than any other!

and yes, it's easy to see how well propaganda works when it's used effectively.

the sheeple clamour for more and more not realizing how slippery the slope really is.

they don't want to think mostly because they're either too lazy or just plain scared at the thought of thier own government being complicit in any thing remotely connected to a conspiracy.

the majority are easily fooled.

the proof is all around us.

That slippery slope is really greased with the blood of the oppressed. We are seeing our own future here. What have we unleashed? It is now legal and acceptable to torture your opponent- to death if you have to!

Does that mean that, knowing if you're captured you will get tortured, you should consider fighting to your death your only option? Is this what we wanted? Kamikaze style warfare? Like Iran and Iraq, where the sheer volume of Iranians was enough to force Iraq to consider the use of nerve agents(supplied by the US!)? Is that what we- Our illustrious leaders that is- can envision as a similar scenario when "The Other" releases its humanity on us?

We have opened Pandora's box here, and it is time to abandon hope.

When we let others rule we give up our rights to democracy. Trash propaganda shows like '24' illustrate how far down that slippery slope of acceptance of authoritarianism we have progressed. Anyone affiliated to that show is culpable to disseminating the idea that torture's acceptance is inevitable, as much as those approve of it and the agents of oppression who do the torturing in real life. Money is secondary to the propaganda angle. Probably would be tax payer paid even if it was a flop, just like most of the Military does with their support of war films.

Like you Cath, the OFF button is ON a lot more here too! TV is such a lying piece of trash- A byproduct of our own needs to be entertained, so we don't have to know how boring and pointless our lives have become. But we as sheeple need to be told what to do at all times so there goes democracy down the drain.

"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education." Thomas Jefferson

Or dumb them down and mesmerize them with bullshit all day long so that you put them to sleep all life long. It's worse than we thought. We are no longer "the sheeple"- we are now the "SLEEPLE".

That's where they obviously want us to be anyway.

"If there is not struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blow, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." Frederick Douglass

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." Alice Walker

Great post DO.g's.

I keep wondering where we went wrong. We used to care about people--when did we become a nation of only me, me, me at all times?

Have we had it too good for too long a time to be able to remember there are other people who need us?

Have we been able to get anything we want whenever we want for so long we have forgotten that everything 'I' have means somewhere someone is going without?

Has advertising/propaganda filled our minds so completely we don't see beyond what it is selling us including war, arrogance, hate, intolerance, greed? We don't see what those things do to others, what they are going to eventually do to ourselves?

Can we climb back up that slippery slope? If so, can we do it before it is too late to save ourselves? Have we sold our children to the devil in our own laziness and self righteousness?

And where oh where are our churches? Why do they not teach the lessons Jesus brought us? The ones that told us to care about others, to not do to others what we would not want done to ourselves? Why have our churches become immoral themselves?

Why have churches not denounced the messages of 24 as the hight of immorality. They certainly hammer away at the pseudo 'sins' of birth control, euthanasia, and homosexuality, why do they not condemn selfishness, greed, and bearing false witness? Shows like 24 could not exist without what Jesus told us are the most deadly sins.

Why do we turn out backs on the true messages of our chosen god?

My opinion is that we have become a nation of corruption. As Lord Acton said, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." Where and how did we allow ourselves to become so tainted?

It's my opinion that our present descent into madness began when the Soviet Union and the Cold War ceased to be a "threat." Like a schoolyard bully who has defeated all the other bullies, we hold temporary sway as THE superpower. And we're going to play it for all its worth.

What do we care what is going on around us as long as we can shop at Wal-Mart, watch American Idol, Lost, Dancing with the Stars, and agonize over the behavior and fates of bimboes like Anna Nicole and Britney? Are we passing on good values to our kids? No, we are not. Do we value education, honesty, truth, and fairness like we used to do? No, we do not.

Where's the outrage? Why does it seem that Americans care nothing for the fact that wounded soldiers returning from an unnecessary war are neglected and denied the treatment they need and deserve? The Commander-in-Chief lies to the troops just like he lies to the American people, and he is not being held accountable.

While the general populace is oohing and ahhing over Dancing with the Stars and listening to and believing the propoganda machines like Faux News, those politicians that are supposed to be representing we the people are selling us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder is probably Haliburton, a company which is enriching the VP (among others) to the very sweet tune of $20,000+ a DAY and reaping huge profits from an illegal war which has its beginnings based on the lies of a psychotic POTUS and that same rich, greedy, and psychotic VPOTUS. The criminally insane have indeed taken over the asylum!

Were the seeds planted by Richard Nixon? Maybe. Did the Watergate scandal slow our descent into the depths for awhile? Probably, because back then we did have a few politicians and a general population who were morally outraged at Nixon's behavior... at his lies, his machinations, and the general populace was appalled at what we perceived as an almost successful attempt by a president to become so powerful the Constitution was endangered.

We were astonished to discover that Nixon had spied on us secretly and had lied to us openly. We united as a nation and demanded that he be held accountable...and he was, to some extent. At least he was forced out of office while some of his cohorts and cronies went to jail.

Now, it doesn't seem to matter to the American people that their president is a liar, that he's spied on them, that he most likely stole the presidency out from under their noses, and that he and his political machine have done much worse things than Nixon ever thought of doing. Now, it's not just the president who is corrupt, it's the VP and the Secretary of State and most of the Cabinet. Congress is full of corrupt politicians who pander to the corrupt corporations. Those few politicians who seem to want to do something about this vortex of madness don't seem to be having much success at implementing their small strategies.

Far too many representatives in government are now the reps of the corporations rather than the reps of we the people. Government by the corporations, of the corporations, and for the corporations has supplanted we the people. Truth and Justice have fallen and been replaced by Lies and Deceit.

24 is limabughs favorite show.

Catherine said, "Are we passing on good values to our kids? No, we are not. Do we value education, honesty, truth, and fairness like we used to do? No, we do not."

This is what really gets me. It is like abandoning our children, leaving them to harsh realities that are going to bite them.

We have made ourselves the most hated country in the world. That is explained away as 'jealousy'. We are too good, too kind, too wealthy, too powerful, too successful.

Meanwhile, we are being 'led' by criminally insane people. Wealth is being sucked up to only those at the top. Our power is bing used to harm others and ultimately does not protect us--it only makes us even more hated and more vulnerable.

'Successful' people are considered to be the filthy rich--no money no success. Middle class persons are splintering between becoming 'successful' or running up against what it is like in America to fall into poverty. Somehow, the latter still manage to suck up the messages of our class war and believe it is people on the left that are the probelm.

As far as good and kind, it is not good, kind people who promote torture--in 'entertainment', as comedy, as policing and military proceedure. We are surrounded by hate and the belief that torture is an acceptable means of strategy, of amusement, of laughter.

No generation has outdone us at pandering to everything that debases individuals--both as victims and as perpetrators. I just don't understand why we have sunk so low...

Rupert Murdoch is getting payed at both ends of this WAR, or occupation. He sells parts to the death machine and at the same time he sells war and chaos as Romantic uh oh theres that word again Roman. HA. Kiefer gets 10 mil a year to act like that. This tactic of torture has gone on for 100s of years it really never stopped it was just hidden for a long time, now they are doing it out in the open and whats really creepy is some people, or maybe I should say a lot of people think its cool. The Shield is another FOX Murdoch special showing the future.

I don't know why really, but I just hate that show. It sucks .. Not Once but Twenty Four times!

Great line, SI. Mind it I use it?

Not at all Dori .. go for it