In 1997 there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter.
There were message boards, email, websites, maybe some very early blogs, but
the dissemination of information and access to reports, accounts, and
testimonials, for all that we thought at the time was lightning fast, was
nothing compared to today. This thought occurred to me while revisiting Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s
seventeen-year old film about an invented war fed to the media to distract the
public from a Presidential sex scandal two weeks before he hopes to be
reelected. In it, Robert De Niro plays Conrad Brean, a kind of independently
contracted fixer brought into the White House by Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) to
help clean up the mess and potential fallout once the story breaks. So Conrad
enlists the help of Stanly Motss (Dustin Hoffman), a big Hollywood producer, to
put the pieces in place to sell not just a war, but a whole package and all the
emotions and patriotic fervor that come with it, to the public.
