Discussion Main / CIAEvilFBIGood

I wonder if it's particularly common for the Army and Navy (or equivalents thereof) to be contrasted like this.

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From the current page:

"It's worth noting that this kind of public perception is almost completely an American phenomenon, without equivalents in other countries"

... is this actually true? From what I remember of British pop fiction, it often does the same thing, though who's "Good" and "Evil" will depend on who the protagonists are. "Spooks" had MI 5 heroes and usually portrayed MI 6 as shady at best and outright treasonous at worst. Dynamite Comics' run of James Bond had a story arc revolving around a jurisdictional conflict between MI 5 and MI 6, with the head of the former turning out to have ulterior motives. "Foyle's War" had the friction between MI 6 and SOE (with the latter usually more sympathetic thanks to Hilda Pierce), plus the friction between regular cops like Foyle and the intelligence/security community in general. And the last James Bond movie had MI 6 fighting off an attempted takeover by the Joint Intelligence Service (fictional, but portrayed with a GCHQ/NSA vibe).

So, yeah, at least one other country does seem to do this a lot.

The specific hierarchy of law enforcement morality according to fiction:

Private Investigators > Police > FBI > CIA > NSA

Edited by 76.115.192.30 "Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence" Hide / Show Replies

Some Conspiracy theorists because Lee Harvey Oswald was framed because he was Hoover's mole in the CIA trying to dismantle what remained of the Bay of pigs operation on JFK's orders.

I'm not sure if this counts as this trope, but there is another fairly common method portraying the US government agencies, specifically the military. Most media tends to portray the average US soldier as good, or at the very least as a Punch-Clock Villain. If there are special forces or black ops soldiers in the same work, however, you can expect them to be portrayed as evil, emotionless, faceless soldiers wearing all black and toting automatic weapons. Some examples include Prototype (Blackwatch), Half Life Opposing Force (Black Ops), Modern Warfare 2 (Shadow Company), and Dead Rising 1 and 2 (Special Forces). Is this connected enough to get mentioned on this page?