I'm trying to track down the one thing I remember clear enough details of to search for directly: the history of "show, don't tell" being taught as gospel to writers in college which literally came about through CIA funded think tanks as a means of eliminating political writing in popular media, but I can't find the article that was linked here a few months ago and google turns up a mountain of unrelated things that I'm too tired to sort through. My memory of postmodern art and CIA funding is even vaguer, I just know it was promoted both formally and informally as "western culture" to compete with the socialist realism promoted by the USSR.

Making a post specifically asking for reading on the topic would probably get more attention from people who keep a better record of that sort of thing than I do, since I never remember to bookmark and catalogue stuff like that.