The FBI and the X-Files

[Matthew Gaylor]

THE FBI AND THE X-FILES

The recent troubles of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are a far
cry from the nearly unanimous praise the agency received from the
federal government and the media for most of its life. Yet judging by
the popularity of the Fox-TV show "The X-Files," the American public
entertained doubts about the FBI years before it had heard about
Robert Hanssen, Wen Ho Lee, or the agency's missing firearms and
laptop computers.

What a tidal change. Before the show debuted, Fox executives worried
that the show's political undertones, implying that the FBI routinely
withheld Important News from the public, would turn off too many
viewers. Today, we know "The X-Files" was the hit that put Fox on the
map.

"One can see what an extraordinary development 'The X-Files'
represents in American popular culture by concentrating on the fact
that, for all its science-fiction and horror elements, it is
fundamentally a series about the FBI," writes Paul Cantor in the
summer issue of THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW.

"As a TV advertiser might put it, however, this is not your father's
FBI -- and certainly not J. Edgar Hoover's. Far from being the hero
of the series, as one might expect on American television, the
federal agency is virtually the villain."

And the FBI's television villainy was not limited to bureaucratic
incompetence, although that was one aspect. "As the series developed,
it began to suggest that the opposition to [main characters] Mulder
and Scully is the product of sinister forces working within the FBI
or at least exerting pressure on it from other branches of the
federal government. We gradually learn that this agency, which more
than any other over the years has represented the federal
government's ability to uncover threats to its citizens is being used
as part of a plot to cover up the greatest threat the American people
have ever faced -- a worldwide conspiracy to aid aliens in taking
over the earth."

"Alien takeover" aside, the reality of the FBI's problems may simply
be inherent in the agency's operations as a government bureaucracy
subject to political whims and pressures.

See: "This Is Not Your Father's FBI: 'The X-Files' and the
Delegitimation of the Nation-State" by Paul Cantor (THE INDEPENDENT
REVIEW, Summer 2001), at:

http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink3-29-4.html

Also see:

Bruce Benson's op-ed, "The Countervailing Trend to FBI Failures," at:

http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink3-29-5.html

TO SERVE AND PROTECT: Privatization and Community in Criminal
Justice, by Bruce Benson (The Independent Institute/New York
University Press, 1998)

http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink3-29-6.html

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