Wag the Dog: PR Ethics, Propaganda, and Political Spin

PRSA Ethics and Conrad Bream's Conduct

The Public Relations Society of America espouses a code of ethics that includes protecting and advancing the free flow of "accurate and truthful" information. Likewise, the PRSA advocates honesty and accuracy in its core practice guidelines for professionals. In Wag the Dog, Conrad Bream (Robert De Niro) deliberately engineers 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 PRSA, which would never admit Bream as one of its members. Interestingly, however, Bream does not try to lie about the sex scandal itself — he 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 that 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 must cover its tracks and decides it will be acceptable to tell the public that the war with Albania "has been resolved." Thus, Bream engages government complicity in his plan and, in doing so, follows the second major ethical tenet of the PRSA — "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 fulfilling the third ethical tenet of the PRSA: to "protect confidential and private information." Bream accomplishes this goal with aplomb, as the sex scandal involving the Firefly Girl is never made public. The President's confidential and private information is allowed to remain that way. Bream also covers his own tracks, further protecting confidential and private information. It is, however, uncertain whether Bream promotes "healthy and fair competition among professionals," as advised by the PRSA. Bream remains firmly in charge, and there is no question of other spin doctors needing to participate in the sex-scandal cover-up.

On the other hand, Bream does recognize the problems associated with "conflicts of interest," another principle advanced by the PRSA. He is well aware of what conflicts of interest look like and what form they may take. At one point, actress Tracy Lime (Kirsten Dunst) asks Bream if she can "put it on my resume," to which Bream coolly replies that if she did, he would "come to your house and kill you." This moment of foreshadowing underscores Bream's commitment to his professional obligations. 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, seeking personal fame and self-aggrandizement over his duty to protect the President — his client. Therefore, it is Motss who violates the conflict-of-interest principle. Bream does not, and he summarily eliminates the conflict of interest before it becomes a problem for his client. Because Bream's work is so powerfully successful, other persons in positions of power would do well to consider hiring him. In this sense, Bream does work to "strengthen the public's trust in the profession."

The Meaning of the Title

The title of the film is one of its more esoteric elements. The phrase originates from the expression: "If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog." In an astute analysis of the film and its title, Levinson identifies two possible interpretations. One is that the media is the tail and the public is the dog. Taken this way, the public relations firm is lumped in with the media — both are the backsides, the parts most people do not pay attention to, yet which, when "smarter," can cause the public to think, feel, and behave in certain ways. Marketing and public relations alike depend on the tail wagging the dog.

Levinson also notes that for the purposes of Wag the Dog, the tail is the public relations machine itself — with Bream at its helm — and the dog is actually the President of the United States. The implication is clear: the President is not as powerful as he seems. The public relations manager is invisible, working behind the scenes like a dog's tail. Empowered by his intelligence and cunning, Bream wags the dog because the President is effectively at his behest. The President depends on Bream for his political viability, and it is only because of Bream that he is re-elected.

Real-World Political Parallels

Wag the Dog arrived on the heels of several real-life political scandals. The film was based on a book about using the Gulf War as a political distraction from more pressing events. More notably, the film was released almost immediately before the Clinton sex scandal broke. Coppens claims that Operation Desert Fox, Operation Infinite Reach, and Operation Allied Force — ironically also set in the Balkans, though not Albania — were "inspirations" for the Clinton administration and were in fact used to divert the public's attention. It has also been reported that Serbian state television broadcast the film during the NATO-led bombing of its country as part of Clinton's campaign (Coppens). In Soft News Goes to War, Matthew Baum also notes that the "soft news" media 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 unfolded during President George W. Bush's presidency resembled Wag the Dog and its themes to a profound degree. The September 11 terrorist attacks initiated a cascade of public relations responses and churned the American propaganda machine into high gear. Just as Motss in Wag the Dog knows exactly what elements to include in the Albania footage — the "Anne Frank sound," the "flames" on the building — the White House knew how to garner public affection for the war on terror. This was how "freedom fries" were born. Ironically, a character in Wag the Dog states that the purpose of war is to "ensure their way of life," which is precisely the kind of phrase that media and White House officials repeated constantly during the Bush administration.

The Bush administration secured the full support of the American public, enough so that waging an unrelated war in Iraq went largely unquestioned. It was as if the September 11 attacks served as the "suitcase bomb in Canada" — a dramatic crisis that distracted the American public from scrutinizing the administration's broader political agendas in Iraq. Propaganda campaigns designed to generalize about Muslims fomented anti-Islamic fear, meaning that America would have supported almost any campaign framed as protecting "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 through imagery. What makes reality scarier — and stranger than fiction — is that the media does not need to hire a movie producer to wag the dog. The news media uses real documentary evidence: film footage, sound bites, and photography. The array of media formats available to news producers can be assembled in ways that construct a particular narrative. That narrative can say almost anything editors want it to, without ever hiring a Motss. The public cares about media integrity but often feels powerless to act. If the public were indeed "smarter," it might be able to turn the tables on the media. As things stand, Baum argues that the public is generally lulled into a false sense of complacency by "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 packages foreign policy and other serious matters as entertainment. As Maslin observes, 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).

Conclusion

Wag the Dog remains a sharp and unsettling critique of the relationship between political power, public relations, and media manipulation. By measuring Bream's conduct against the PRSA code of ethics, tracing the implications of the film's title metaphor, drawing parallels to real political events, and cataloguing its propaganda techniques, it becomes clear that the film is far more than a dark comedy. It is a sustained argument that public opinion can be manufactured, that the line between governance and spin is dangerously thin, and that a sufficiently sophisticated public relations operation can make the dog — even the President of the United States — dance at the tail's command.

Works Cited

Baum, Matthew. Soft News Goes to War.

Baum, Matthew A. "Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public." American Political Science Review 1, 2002, pp. 91–109.

Coppens, Philip. "Wag the Dog." Retrieved online: http://www.philipcoppens.com/wagthedog.html

Levinson, B. "Wag the Dog." In HSC Advanced English.

Levinson, B. Wag the Dog. [Feature Film].

Maslin, Janet. "Wag the Dog (1997)." [Film Review.] The New York Times. 26 Dec. 1997.

Public Relations Society of America. "Ethics." 2014. Retrieved online: http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/Ethics/