That, or it's purely coincidental that "24" debuted following disclosure of Bush's torture programs, and "Person of Interest" debuted ahead of common knowledge of the extent of mass surveillance.
It may not be propaganda officially ordered and authored by some Ministry of Information, but it's the same thing no matter how many layers of abstraction it goes through: a way to shape the narrative and facts that inform the common person and allow them to form an understanding of an issue.
The interpretation that better reconciles the timeline is that both the show and the torture program are attempts to capitalize on the same public sentiment that led to this song: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtesy_of_the_Red,_White_and_... (select lyrics: "Cause we'll put a boot in your ass; It's the American way"), peaking at #1 on Billboard's list of Hot Country Songs.
Remember also that producers of these shows often do have contact with members of the intelligence and defense communities who serve as official or unofficial advisors, at least so long as the depictions are acceptable to the establishment. Through these advisors, entertainment producers learn about secret programs long before the public. Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a particularly prominent recent example of how this works, and why it is a bad thing that results in "entertainment" which is very much a form of propaganda.
I don't know how many people here really remember the mood back then. I was just starting college at Georgia Tech when Season 2 of "24" came on. It was hugely popular in my dorm. And the overall sentiment was pretty violent. In the run-up to the Iraq war the next year, it was less controversial to say that we should turn the middle east into a "glass parking lot" than to argue against going to war. And this is of course among people who were relatively liberal compared to the region as a whole.
As often in real life. There's this report from late 2006 (though I haven't checked any other sources)...
"Last week Omar Nasiri, a Moroccan who spent seven years infiltrating al-Qaeda as a double agent working for the French and British intelligence services, told the BBC’s Newsnight programme that al-Qaeda deliberately fed false information to the US government in order to encourage it to invade Iraq. According to Nasiri (a pseudonym), Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who ran al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and was captured in the US invasion of that country five years ago, told his US interrogators that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the terrorist organisation to plan attacks with chemical and biological weapons. [...] American forces had scooped up Ibn Sheikh al-Libi in Afghanistan in November, 2001, and sent him off to Egypt to be tortured (because the US itself doesn’t do torture) in the presence of American interrogators. And Libi told his lie about Saddam Hussein’s complicity with al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell seized on as justification for the US attack on Iraq."
By the way, I've got to hand it to Person of Interest for creating a show about technology and the singularity that isn't completely ridiculous with its use of computers and jargon. They're also not really pro-surveillance. To quote Finch:
"...the machine is... wonderful and terrible..."
It's also a show where bad guys (the government) are using torture, and it's horrific. On last night's episode they mutilated a main character just to make a point.
In a sense, I think PoI is somehow the spiritual successor of the X Files in a sense that it alternates between "monster of the week" (in this case: criminal of the week) and the big storyline which is about a corrupt and power-hungry government at every level from local city politicians all the way up to vast and limitless government agencies, and about everyone's love-hate-and-exploitation relationship with a superior intelligence (which was the aliens in X-Files).
It's a show that makes some powerful and ballsy statements, while at the same time keeping up the light entertainment of what's ostensibly a vigilante show.
