An excerpt from my script review for Wag the Dog which will be available 06/23/25:
1.) Marketability of the Idea
Of course it’s true. I saw it on TV.
This is a line that Brean mentions several times throughout the script, when referring to the “war” with Albania.
And when you think about it, can we truly trust what we see?
Local news, cables news, social media, and now AI, we’re generally fed, because we gravitate to, the news we want to hear creating our own truth.
Certainly there’s biased news on each side, but I’m not going to make the argument “both sides do it equally,” because they don’t.
There’s only one side of the aisle that’s convinced they’re the “true patriots” acting as the last line of defense for America and freedom with their guns, flag merch, and We the People tattoos while also requiring heart medication and Ozempic because they’re overweight and out of shape.
The opposite side (setting aside the pronoun argument) may not be thrilled with the current predicament the country is in, but that’s vastly different from “hating America” and they are under no delusions that they’re somehow going to Rambo us all free from dictatorship with a few fellow neighbors.
But I digress…
What can we trust nowadays?
One tired discussion is that we’ll never have the likes of Cronkite again…but was Walter one hundred percent truthful with us?
Sure the Reagan Administration played a big part in dismantling the Fairness Doctrine, paving the way for the likes of Fox News and such, but how could we be certain that what we were being presented on TV before then was completely legit?
And that brings us to today’s script from the late 1990s, before social media and artificial intelligence.
Brean, Ames and Motss are tasked with distracting the public for eleven days so the current President has a chance at being reelected.
His scandal? Alleged sexual assault (and possibly rape) of a thirteen year old girl in the Oval Office.
Think about that…this heinous crime is something no politician could come back from right?
…RIGHT?!
Consider the state of today’s politics…is his demise a certainty or a mere possibility that can be denied long enough that it’s forgotten?
Change the story, change the lead…is another quote from Brean when he talks about working for Ronald Reagan.
Applied to today, if a sexual scandal were to be discovered, with a 24 hour news cycle, are we only one round of bombings, tariffs, outrageous tweets away from forgetting it completely?
No, this script is only more relevant today than in 1998.
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