"Of Course There is a War, I'm Watching it on Television": What does the film teach us about techniques of propaganda as a public relations tool?

The film Wag the Dog is a comical, yet frighteningly accurate, portrayal of the use of propaganda in the political system. In the film, Robert De Niro is a public relations expert for the White House that enlists a Hollywood producer, portrayed brilliantly by Dustin Hoffman, to help the current president win the election following an immigration and sex scandal. The film shows how easy it is to manipulate the American public with mass media. Both De Niro and Hoffman's characters understands the way to use fear, patriotism, and sympathy to sway the audience. In order to appeal to the public, they use a combination of underhanded public relations campaigns on television and radio.

First, they create a fake war scene with an Albanian girl with a white, not calico, cat. They made such to tweak the image of the girl to make it has sympathetic as possible as well as to outrage the public. Next, they used images of a fake war hero to divert the audiences's attention away from the scandal and instill positive feeling about the president. De Niro and Hoffman used a team of PR experts to come up with an effective propaganda campaign that included sympathetic images, played on patriotism, and even had a theme song as well as a slogan. In the end, the unethical propaganda worked because the American public is gullible and believes anything as long as it is in a neat package.