War Made Easy: 50 Years of Deception and Media Spin (2007)

"War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death"
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/movies/14easy.html
The conflicts may change, but the verbiage remains the same in "War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," a depressing look at political manipulation and news media compliance.
Based on Norman Solomon's 2005 book, Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp's nonpartisan documentary is less about propaganda than our news media's role in its dissemination. Referring to multiple American conflicts, Mr. Solomon — who appears on screen to connect the sound bites — presents a litany of journalistic pandering and critical laziness. Bellicose speeches by presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to George W. Bush reveal frighteningly similar locutions that are then parroted by news organizations fearful of appearing unpatriotic.
Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, "War Made Easy" avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive. Many of its arguments have been made before — most recently by the excellent four-part "Frontline" series, "News War" — but Mr. Solomon digs deeper and hammers harder, comparing European and American coverage and lambasting cable news networks for their unquestioning reliance on the White House message of the day. "We should have been more skeptical," the CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer admits. You think, Wolf?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1015246/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-made-easy/
In real time, officials have explained and justified these military operations to the American people by withholding crucial information about the actual reasons and potential costs of military action again and again, choosing to present an easier version of war's reality; a steady and remarkably consistent storyline designed not to inform, but to generate and maintain support and enthusiasm for war. War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• US
• American
• wars
• democracy
• spin
• manipulation
• news
• media

[airforcerotc305]

My god, if only all could see.

[osysbites]

Incredible documentary - all should see, horrible though it is.

[StrongArmZZ]

God damn these snakes. Off with their heads

[japislav]

whiiiimp......president. :D

[Tsnore]

These men's nuts should all be impaled on the White House's wrought iron fence spikes with a descriptive plaque about the Iraq invasion to inform tourists.

[Tsnore]

Was that Sean "I-need-another-cup-of Irish Coffee" Penn still trying to atone for marrying Madonna?

[WilliamKBunker]

End the next war!

[chuckfrmgamestop]

It seems like these same people would be saying that using violence on an intruder in your house would make you a hypocrite or a liar if you said that you "do not like to use violence." or that the fact that the intruder might harm you or steal your things are just poor excuses for using violence. It is possible to use violence to create peace.

[Trafener]

Was this aired on american tv? its immensely powerful

[arock75]

This is something that every American needs to see