Disney’s Ode to State Repression

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/14/disneys-ode-to-state-repression/

Wikileaks, The Fifth Estate and Corporate Pop Culture’s War on Whistleblowers

If Walt Disney had actually been cryonically frozen and subsequently revived, he’d be laughing his ass off with delight at the reactionary dreck his namesake film company has just pumped out with The Fifth Estate. The film’s central themes would have been right up the notorious right winger’s alley — from the racist stereotype of the ‘good Arab’ State Department asset to its reactionary embrace of censorship, lest full disclosure ‘harm’ a government busily committing and covering up the evidence of its war crimes.

Wikileaks has opined at some length on both the film’s egregious factual inaccuracies and the lethal intent of its embedded meta-messages. Certainly The Fifth Estate serves as a rolling character assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — in these kinds of toxic infotainment fabrications, it’s always more important to spin the politics of personality than to honestly examine the realpolitic of governments and the corporations they represent. But the film is just one cog in the wider wheel of wholesale assault on advocacy journalism and freedom of the press – and it diligently parrots the larger spin that government authorities use to subvert an uncensored review of their crimes.