In the movie Wag the Dog they do just that. It is a movie about a Presidential race. The sitting President has brought a young girl into a room, and has had relations with her. The news is leaking fast about the affair, and the President may loose his re-election if the story becomes national news. The President is in China right now and cannot comment or defend himself. He merely relies on his campaign commercials that repeat his slogan. “You don’t change horses in midstream.” This is supposed to say that it would be just stupid to go for someone else when the current President is doing fine.

So while the President is gone he relies on Conrad Brean and Winifred Ames to save his reputation and create a cover up for what he has done.

The manipulation of the media goes way before Wag the Dog and Ronald Reagan though. It even goes back as far as WWI. In World War I Germany invaded Belgium, a small neutral country that didn’t let the German army use them as a route to France. Propaganda was then started by opposing countries to rally support against Germany. This Propaganda was sometimes not even close to the facts but its what people saw and read, so they believed it. And soon enough America was so close to war that it took a single ship with American passengers to give us a reason to fight against Germany.

They look through to see if they could find the perfect soldier for them to bring home. They do, they find a soldier with the name of Schumann. They create a digitaly mastered picture of him that they could show to the American public, and they wrote a song that they put out on the radio about him coming home. The people loved it. The producer was in his prime, he was making things happen and creating stories that people love.

Media is and will always be the conductor between a government and the people they govern. The worlds best leaders knew that. Look at Stalin in the USSR, he controlled the media, he controlled the news paper. He let them know what he wanted them to know. Look at Mohammad. He wrote a book, the Koran, this book along with Mohammad created an Empire. Even look at our very own country, the fathers of our nation were mostly writers. They all had their own news papers in their own towns. The Boston Massacre wasn’t a massacre. It was just portrayed that way. You can look at almost any reform or change and you could find a piece of literature, a drawing, or any type of media that had an effect on the reform.

The role of the media is so huge in politics that if anyone could learn to deceive and control it they could do almost whatever they wanted. When the case about Monica Lewinski came out into the public Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”. Because of the media this was one of the most mimicked quotes or phrases in the next year and a half.

In conclusion the movie Wag the Dog was a very, very good movie. The movie showed people the controls they have in their life. People only know what they are told. You would never know what a gun was if someone never told you, but if they showed you one you would know they existed. This is like the media, they show us so we are convinced it is

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