The Tenacious Journalist Who Exposed the Pentagon’s Chief Hollywood Propagandist
Phil Strub, who worked in the Pentagon's liaison office, recently died. Reporter David Robb exposed his role in censoring movies, and incredibly, Robb died on December 8.
“We may think that the content of American movies is free from government interference, but in fact, the Pentagon has been telling filmmakers what to say — and what not to say — for decades. It’s Hollywood’s dirtiest little secret,” journalist Dave Robb wrote in his 2004 book, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies.
It documented and exposed the extent to which Hollywood was complicit in the United States military’s “campaign to covertly manipulate” opinions around “world politics, American history, the nature of war, and above all, the image of the American military establishment itself.”
On December 8, according to Deadline, Robb died. He had recently been diagnosed with “inoperable cancer of the brain stem.”
In 2023, there are a number of journalists that cover the beat of military or government influence over film and television productions. But in the 2000s, Robb practically stood alone as one of the only reporters willing to take on the military industrial-complex.
Read the full article at The Wide Shot, Kevin Gosztola’s movie publication on Medium.
Thanks Kevin. His work was very important.
$185 usd weekly when he started .. interesting datapoint. For comparison, I was offered $144 nzd fortnightly when I started at Cook Islands News in 1982. At the time, US dollars were roughly double the kiwi versions, also at a time when the pound was three-to-one our dollar.
Sounds like a lot less, and it was, but more than I was getting working two jobs, at a furniture factory and at nights at a theatre shop. A princely sum in other words, but they were desperate for anyone who could hear and type words lol
Mostly tho, what an inspiring story for those of us who despair at journalism misfortunes. We might be going down, but we're going down fighting - and the fight is far from over.