I’ve done a couple of posts about the TV show “24,” and how the right has mistakenly interpreted it as an endorsement of the Bush administration’s least defensible policies. As it turns out, I might have been a little hasty.
Jane Mayer has a fascinating piece in the latest issue of The New Yorker about the politics of “24” and its creator, Joel Surnow, who, I was surprised to learn, describes himself as a “right-wing nut job.” For reasons I’ve already described, some of the arguments conservatives find support for are misplaced, but in at least one key area, “24” is, rather intentionally, making an argument sympathetic to Bush and his backers. The issue, of course, is torture.
The grossly graphic torture scenes in Fox’s highly rated series “24” are encouraging abuses in Iraq, a brigadier general and three top military and FBI interrogators claim.
The four flew to Los Angeles in November to meet with the staff of the show. They said it is hurting efforts to train recruits in effective interrogation techniques and is damaging the image of the U.S. around the world, according The New Yorker.
“I’d like them to stop,” Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the magazine.
Finnegan and others told the show’s creative team that the torture depicted in “24” never works in real life, and by airing such scenes, they’re encouraging military personnel to act illegally.
“People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen,” said Tony Lagouranis, who was a U.S. Army interrogator in Iraq and attended the meeting. “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about ’24’?” Finnegan said.
In fact, Mayer relays an anecdote from Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, who tried to explain to his students that Jack Bauer would be prosecuted for his conduct. The class was not persuaded. After one particularly aggressive interrogation scene, Solis said, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”
As for Joel Surnow’s politics, the show creator apparently was persuaded by a few names that will be familiar to you.
Surnow’s rightward turn was encouraged by one of his best friends, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-core conservative who, in 2006, wrote and produced “The Path to 9/11,” a controversial ABC miniseries that presented President Clinton as having largely ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda. (The show was denounced as defamatory by Democrats and by members of the 9/11 Commission; their complaints led ABC to call the program a “dramatization,” not a “documentary.”) Surnow and Nowrasteh met in 1985, when they worked together on “The Equalizer.” Nowrasteh, the son of a deposed adviser to the Shah of Iran, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where, like Surnow, he was alienated by the radicalism around him. He told me that he and Surnow, in addition to sharing an admiration for Reagan, found “L.A. a stultifying, stifling place because everyone thinks alike.” Nowrasteh said that he and Surnow regard “24” as a kind of wish fulfillment for America. “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business — even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”
In recent years, Surnow and Nowrasteh have participated in the Liberty Film Festival, a group dedicated to promoting conservatism through mass entertainment. Surnow told me that he would like to counter the prevailing image of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a demagogue and a liar. Surnow and his friend Ann Coulter — the conservative pundit, and author of the pro-McCarthy book “Treason” — talked about creating a conservative response to George Clooney’s recent film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Surnow said, “I thought it would really provoke people to do a movie that depicted Joe McCarthy as an American hero or, maybe, someone with a good cause who maybe went too far.” He likened the Communist sympathizers of the nineteen-fifties to terrorists: “The State Department in the fifties was infiltrated by people who were like Al Qaeda.” But, he said, he shelved the project. “The blacklist is Hollywood’s orthodoxy,” he said. “It’s not a movie I could get done now.”
A year and a half ago, Surnow and Manny Coto, a “24” writer with similar political views, talked about starting a conservative television network. “There’s a gay network, a black network — there should be a conservative network,” Surnow told me. But as he and Coto explored the idea they realized that “we weren’t distribution guys — we were content guys.”
They needn’t worry; there’s already Fox News.
Anyway, read the whole article. Whether you’ve seen the show or not, Surnow is, unfortunately, having an impact. It’s not helping.