When I first started working in PR and was curious about how the world really works, my boss and agency MD at the time, Ingrid Lotze, gave me an unexpected piece of advice: to watch the movie Wag the Dog.
Last weekend, as newsfeeds filled with reports of escalating strikes and retaliation in the Middle East, I could not help but think about her recommendation, because truth is often stranger than fiction and because that 1997 satire feels more relevant today than it did then.
Wag the Dog is a film about attention and the machinery that shapes what the public sees, what it feels, what it debates, and what it forgets. In the movie, a political crisis threatens a presidency, and the response is a crafted story.
The president is advised to manufacture a conflict produced like a campaign, complete with symbols, a soundtrack, and a narrative arc designed to push other headlines aside.
Back then, it played as a sharp, uncomfortable joke about media manipulation in the age of television.
Today, it reads less like satire and more like a field guide to the information ecosystem, not because governments now “control everything,” but because the system does not need a single control room to produce the same effect.
Nobody has to invent the war
The real update to Wag the Dog is that nobody has to invent the war.
The film’s hook is fabrication, building a fake conflict, feeding it to the media, and redirecting the public agenda.
In 2026, the closer parallel is not that wars are invented, but that real conflict can be narrativised so aggressively, and so competitively, that the storyline begins to exert more influence than the underlying reality, especially when multiple actors, each with their own incentives, amplify the same framing at a very fast pace.
It’s a grim reality that this is not a storyline we are discussing, but real lives caught in real chaos, the Wag the Dog parallel sits in the information scramble that forms around it.
This weekend’s escalation has shown how quickly the world shifts into story mode, as announcements and counterclaims collide with urgent statements and immediate second-order impacts such as airspace closures, travel disruption, and wider economic ripple effects.
When the world is this volatile, attention becomes a strategic asset, and narrative becomes the currency.
Most shareable version of events
The first 24 hours belong to the most shareable version of events.
One of the most accurate truths in Wag the Dog is that the story that travels fastest is the one that feels complete. It has a clear villain, a clear victim, a clear hero, and a simple message that fits into a sentence. It does not ask people to do homework.
It asks them to feel something and pass it on.
That is not an insult to the public; it’s human. People are busy, tired, worried about their own lives, and they do not have time to study every breaking story like a researcher.
So, the brain looks for shortcuts. What does this mean? Who is right? Who is wrong? What side should I be on? What should I fear? What should I be angry about?
That is why the modern influence game is often about packaging. A short clip can beat a long explanation. A screenshot can beat a full article. A headline can become the whole story. A dramatic image can look like proof, even when it is missing context.
And now, with editing tools and AI, it is easier than ever for “convincing” to arrive before “confirmed.”
This is why modern crisis communication, geopolitical messaging, and influence campaigns compete on formats as much as facts, because the clipped video, the screenshot, the meme, and the line that feels like a conclusion can outrun nuance before it has time to assemble itself.
In the film, proof becomes aesthetic; in today’s world, aesthetics often function as evidence.
We don’t have gatekeepers anymore; we have accelerators. In the 90s, the joke was that a few powerful people could feed a narrative to a few big media houses, and the country would follow. Today, it is more chaotic than that, and that chaos can be even more effective.
Oil prices surge to highest since 2022 at over $119 a barrel on Middle East war
The lesson
So what do we do with the lesson, without sliding into cynicism?
The wrong takeaway from Wag the Dog is that nothing can be trusted, because that belief creates a vacuum that can be filled by whatever story feels strongest.
A better takeaway is disciplined attention, assume narrative strategy exists, and then apply higher standards to what you consume, repeat, and emotionally invest in.
That discipline can look like treating early reporting as provisional in fast-moving conflicts, separating what is confirmed from what is circulating, noticing when a story is emotionally perfect and therefore more likely to be engineered, and recognising when your outrage or certainty is being recruited as fuel.
For leaders, whether in government, business, or civil society, the film’s modern relevance is also a warning about reputational fragility, because in a world that runs on attention, you manage what happened, what people believe happened, and what that belief will do next.
The advice to watch the movie was about building pattern recognition early because communication is an infrastructure that shapes what societies notice, what they debate, and what they demand.
This weekend, as the world watches escalation and retaliation with that familiar mix of fear, fascination, and fatigue, Wag the Dog sits in the background as a caution sign, because the fight over reality’s meaning is constant, and the most important discipline we can practice, personally and professionally, is refusing to let speed, spectacle, and premature certainty replace the slower work of truth.
Recent Comments