THE NEW CONTEXT
07 ISSUE IX
NOVEMBER 2025
NOVEMBER 2025
War is also always a matter of image
Revisiting two classic films about building a reality through the media: “Wag the Dog” (1997) and Control Room (2004).
By Chiara Nanni
The media don’t just report reality, they create it. Through images, ideas, and narratives, they make not only communication tools but also weapons of power. How a particular event is represented or concealed can significantly influence its political and moral significance. Two cinematic pieces, despite being from different periods, genres, and contexts, address this issue in surprisingly similar ways: “Wag the Dog” (1997) and “Control Room” (2004). The former is a political satire about media power in the United States; the latter is a documentary about the journalistic narrative of the Iraq War, which lasted from 2003 to 2011, well after the second film appeared.
Image by Phillip V. Caruso, via New Line Cinema/Photofest.
“Wag the Dog” tells the story of a completely fabricated war constructed from scratch, created to manipulate public opinion away from a sexual scandal involving the US president, eleven days before an election. “Control Room” shows how real wars are described and filtered by global media. Both share the same intuition: reality is nothing but a mediated construction, a product of mass communication and its dynamics of power. To watch them together means exploring the transformation of journalism into spectacle, of politics into marketing, of war into narration.
Released in 1997 and directed by Barry Levinson, Wag the Dog revolves around the efforts of spin doctor Conrad Brean (played by Robert De Niro), who is tasked with diverting the media and the public’s attention away from a presidential scandal. To do so, Brean devises a cynical but effective plan: to create a war against Albania. When asked why Albania, he responds, “Why not?”
With the help of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (played by Dustin Hoffman), Brean fabricates the fake conflict with Albania. The phony war is supported by television reports, pictures, patriotic songs, and made-up “histories” of war heroes. Everything is created in a studio, with the same care and logic as the ones for a movie. The goal is to make the public see, feel, and believe in a war that never happened.
From the title itself, we understand that there’s a switch in the balance of power: it’s not the dog that wags the tail, but it’s the tail that wags the dog: politics is manipulating the media. Levinson, by doing this, constructs a corrosive satire about the ability of political operatives, with the help of television, to transform lies into a shared truth. The film, despite being a comedy, offers philosophical reflection on today’s society, where “war is show business,” and the distinction between reality and fiction is blurred. The characters are not merely lying; they’re creating an alternative reality that is perfectly credible because images and videos support it, all prearranged in a studio. Interestingly, the president never appears in the film, yet we know that everything revolves around him. The people believe what they hear on the news, even if it does not come directly from the president himself. I think it shows how the main character is the power of media in the service of politics, not only in the movie, but in real life, too. The war here becomes a mediatic product, packaged with the same logic as an entertainment movie. The goal is not to inform, but rather to manipulate, create consensus, and distract.
Many decades later, the film appears to be prophetic. It anticipates the concept of fake news, political marketing, and the mediated construction of emergency. Its strength doesn’t come only from satire, but also from the ability to show that real power no longer lies in institutions but in who controls the communication media. Politics has become a cinematographic set, and reality is just a script that can be changed.
Still from Control Room, via Mubi.
If “Wag the Dog” imagined an invented war, “Control Room” documents a real one, but just as manipulated. Directed by Egyptian-American Jehane Noujaim, the documentary tells the story of the Iraq War from the perspective of the employees at the Arab news network Al Jazeera. Set inside the editorial offices of Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar and at CENTCOM, the media center set up by the US military to direct coverage of the war. Much of the action plays out during the first months of the American invasion of Iraq in 2001, the documentary reveals the tensions, editorial choices, and contradictions of information that are at the center of the conflict. Noujaim confronts two perspectives: that of Al Jazeera, accused by the United States of pursuing anti-American propaganda, and that of Western media, which relies on and repeats the Pentagon official version of the facts without verifying its accuracy or its slant.
Using interviews and direct records, “Control Room” reveals that no broadcast news channel is neutral; every channel builds its own reality based on its culture, its interests, and its own public. Information itself becomes a symbolic battlefield. The images of bombs, prisoners, and injured civilians are selected and spread to evoke certain precise emotions: compassion, patriotism, and indignation. It shows how war is also fought on the imaginary soil.
In the film, the idea that truth does not exist as an objective fact, but rather as a strategic narration, strongly emerges. It supports the notion that the media primarily serve to fabricate consensus for the dominant political and economic power.
Something truly interesting and valid is that Noujaim avoids any ideological condemnation: she does not paint Al Jazeera as heroic or the Americans as absolute manipulators. Instead, she shows the complexity of a world in which every voice participates in shaping power. A great example of this is Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a media officer for the US military, who talks about his reactions after seeing the footage of dead Americans versus dead Iraqis. He admits that his gut reaction has not been the same when viewing the American versus Iraqi deaths, then adds, “It makes me hate war.” In another scene, an Al Jazeera editor questions the idea of “objective journalism,” stating that it is an impossible ideal. “Control Room” confirms and completes the vision that “Wag the Dog” had: war today is always a matter of image. The only difference is that in 2004, the show was not a satirical invention, but a daily reality.
Watched together, “Wag the Dog” and “Control Room” trace a striking line between cinematic fiction and political reality. In 1997, Levinson used irony to warn of a then-theoretical danger: the collapse of politics into pure spectacle. By 2004, Noujaim had already revealed that this danger had materialized. What functions as a narrative paradox in the first film becomes, in the second, the everyday logic of a global media system in which events are continuously interpreted, filtered, and staged as spectacle.
Both films reveal that real power no longer consists in the possession of weapons or economic resources, but in the ability to control narratives.
While in “Wag the Dog,” manipulation is centralized (a few communication experts decide what the public must believe), in “Control Room,” power is fragmented and spread among different actors (governments, journalists, and viewers). Still, the logic is the same: whoever controls the images controls the perception of reality. In “Wag the Dog,” the citizens accept a fake war because they want to believe in it, because they prefer the emotion of the story to the doubt of the truth. In “Control Room,” the global public looks for more confirmation than information: everyone chooses the channel that reflects their own vision of the world.
Chiara Nanni is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.