Wag the Dog
The Public Relations Society of America espouses a code of ethics that includes protecting and advancing the free flow of "accurate and truthful" information ("Ethics"). Likewise, the Public Relations Society of America advocates honesty and accuracy in its core practice guidelines for professionals. In Wage the Dog, Conrad Bream (Robert DeNiro) deliberately machinates a plan to divert the public's attention away from a presidential sex scandal by hiring movie producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) to manufacture multimedia images for the media. The fake war is an outright, deliberate, and overt affront to the first ethical tenet of the Public Relations Society of America, which would never admit Bream as one of its members. Interestingly, though, Bream does not try to lie about the sex scandal, but only wants to create a lie that will prove more sensational in the media.
Every other example of how Bream violates the core tenet of accuracy and truth follows from this first ethical infraction. For instance, a fake war can dupe the public but not the Pentagon. When senior military officials and members of the Central Intelligence Agency discover the Armenian conflict is a sham, they order full disclosure. Here, Bream is being as honest as he ever could be. He convinces the CIA to compromise, by not revealing the full truth about the public relations scam. However, the CIA has to cover its tracks and decides that it will be fine to tell the public the war with Albania "has been resolved." Thus, Bream engages government complicity with his plan and follows the second major ethical tenet of the Public Relations Society of America, which is "informed decision making through open communication." By informing the CIA, Bream encouraged open communication. He likewise remains relatively open with his colleagues and with Stanley Motss.
As the President's senior public relations advisor, Bream is entrusted with the fulfillment of the third ethical tenet of the Public Relations Society of America, which is to "protect confidential and private information." Bream in fact accomplishes this goal with aplomb, as the sex scandal with Firefly Girl is never made public. The President's confidential and private information is allowed to remain that way. He also covers his own tracks, thus protecting confidential and private information. It is, however, uncertain whether Bream promotes "healthy and fair competition among professionals." Bream remains firmly in charge, and there is no question of other spin doctors needing to participate in the process of the sex scandal cover-up.
On the other hand, Bream does recognize the problems associated with "conflicts of interest," as advised by the Public Relations Society of America. Bream is well aware of what conflicts of interest look like, and what form they may take. At one point, an actor Tracy Lime (Kirsten Dunst) asks Bream if she can "put it on my resume," to which Bream neatly replies that she could be he would "come to your house and kill you." This bit of foreshadowing underscores Bream's commitment to his professional ethics. Toward the conclusion of the plot, Bream has no choice but to kill his associate Motss. Motss expresses a desire to gain personally from his involvement in the cover-up, wanting personal fame and self-aggrandizement more than he wants to protect the President, which is the client. Therefore, Motss is the one who violates the conflict of interest principle. Bream does not, and summarily eliminates the conflict of interest before it becomes a problem for his client. Because Bream's work was in fact so powerfully successful, other persons in positions of power would do well to consider hiring him. For this reason, Bream does work to "strengthen the public's trust in the profession."
2. The title of the movie is one of its more esoteric elements. "If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog." In an astute analysis of the film and its title, Levinson states that there are two possible interpretations of its meaning. One is that the media is the tail and the public is the dog. Taken this way, the public relations firm would be lumped in with the media. They are the backsides, the sides that most people do not pay attention to but which when "smarter" can cause the public to think, feel, and behave in certain ways. Marketing banks on the tail wagging the dog, and likewise, so does public relations. Levinson also notes that for the purposes of Wag the Dog, the tail is the public relations machine itself...
The implication of this interpretation is clear. The President is not as powerful as he seems; the public relations manager is invisible, behind the scenes like the tail of the dog. Empowered through his intelligence, Bream wags the dog because the president is at his behest. The president depends on Bream for his political viability, and it is only because of Bream that the president is re-elected.
3. Wag the Dog arrived at the heels of several real-life political scandals. The movie was based on a book about using the Gulf War as a political distraction from more pressing events. More notably is the fact that the film was released almost immediately prior to the Clinton sex scandal. Coppens claims that Operation Desert Fox, Operation Infinite Reach, and Operation Allied Force (ironically also in the Balkans, albeit not Albania) were "inspirations" for the Clinton administration and were in fact used to divert the public's attention. It is rumored also that Serbian state television broadcasted the film during the NATO-led bombing of its country as part of Clinton's plan (Coppens). In Soft News Goes to War, Matthew Baum also points out that the "soft news" media even picked up on the "uncanny parallels between real-world events and a relatively obscure (until then) movie called Wag the Dog," (2).
Even if no actual attempt to cover up the Clinton scandal occurred, what did occur in President George W. Bush's presidency resembled Wag the Dog and its theme to a profound degree. The September 11 terrorist attacks initiated a string of public relations responses and churned the American propaganda machine. Just as Motts in Wag the Dog knows exactly what elements to include in the Albania footage including the "Anne Frank sound," the White House knew how to garner public affection for the war on terror. This was how freedom fries were born. Ironically, several years prior to Bush's war on terror, Young in Wag the Dog states that the purpose of war is to "ensure their way of life," which is exactly the types of phrases being bandied about by media and White House officials during the Bush administration. The Bush administration had the support of the American public fully behind it, enough so that waging unrelated wars in Iraq went unnoticed. It was as if the September 11 terrorist attack was the "suitcase bomb in Canada" that distracted the American public from the more pressing needs of the Bush administration to wield its might and achieve its own political agendas in Iraq. Propaganda campaigns designed to generalize about Muslims fomented anti-Islamic fear, which meant that America would have supported any campaign designed to protect our "way of life."
Although it relies on the literary device of hyperbole, Wag the Dog is as real as it gets. The media regularly manipulates the public with its imagery. What makes reality scarier as well as stranger than fiction is the fact that the media does not need to hire a movie producer to wag the dog. Rather, the news media used real documentary evidence: film footage, sound bytes, and photography. The array of multiple forms of media possessed by news producers can be pieced together in a way that creates a narrative. The narrative can say anything editors want it to, to a degree, without having to hire a Motss. Of course, the public does care about media integrity but feels powerless to do anything about it. If only the public were indeed "smarter" it might be able to wag the dog and turn the tables on the media. As it is, the public seems generally muted into a false sense of complacency because of what Baum calls "selective media coverage by the entertainment-oriented soft news media," (91). Baum found that "politically inattentive" individuals learn about major political events like wars only when the media cloaks foreign policy and other serious matters as entertainment. As Maslin points out, "Wag the Dog" takes the stance that American public policy may be founded on fraud in high places, and that there is no public outpouring too spontaneous-looking to be manipulated by political puppeteers" (1).
4. Wag the Dog is essentially about how governments and public relations firms together create dynamic opportunities for propaganda creation and dissemination. The film includes many instances of propaganda devices. The first device is the overreliance on appeals to emotion. For example, the film footage of the girl with the kitten in Albania is…
