The movie Wag the Dog (1997) is about the President of United States who gets stuck in a sex scandal with a young girl scout, and needs an idea to cover it up before the big election. This is just unethical from the beginning. Knowing that this sex scandal is not a rumor and is true, I can say that I would never vote for a president that has had a sex scandal with a young child. The President looks to Conrad Brean; a notorious political “spin doctor” for a solution to cover up his mistake. The suggestion that Brean makes is to create an artificial war to distract the American people from the scandal with the President. This will hopefully allow the people to be more focused on the fake war with Albania, instead of the scandal. However, the CIA catches wind of this fake war and immediately gets involved. The CIA leaks information that the war in Albania is over and the attention is once again focused back on the President and his scandal. Brean then comes up with the idea of Part 2 of the fabrication, and fabricates another story about a missing soldier who was left in Albania. In the end all goes well for the President, but the producer of the fabricated story (Motts) is upset when the President doesn’t give him credit for helping him be elected. Motts then threatens to release what really happened, and is later found dead due to a “heart attack”. Motts knows that he has been killed to cover up the President’s tracks.

I believe that this correlates directly to the historic event of the Watergate scandal. President Nixon attempted to cover up a break in to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that was instructed by him. This directly correlates with this movie because it shows how both Presidents’ are willing to do unethical things to be elected. The only difference is that in the movie the President is successful. Whereas, Watergate was “the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon (Watergate.info).”

I think this is tough to say how it is handled. I believe that trust is very important when someone is being elected to be the highest representative of a country, and in this situation my trust was broken when I heard about the sex scandal. Obviously not everyone can be perfect and makes mistakes, but a mistake to this degree is just to hard for me to get over to vote for someone as president. I think that if the President wanted to try and rebuild this trust that he could have taken accountability for what he did, and sought out help before returning to run for election. This would have helped my view of him, but instead he proceeded to create this insane story to try and distract the people from his mistake.

I think this will have a pretty big impact on journalism. The meaning of wag the dog is “when something of secondary importance improperly takes on the role of something of primary importance (Urban Dictionary).” This shows that journalism can be used sometimes in a bad way to undermine something that may be extremely important. We have to continue to be focused on what is true information that is being reported, and what is false information.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wag+the+dog

http://watergate.info

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Photo Manipulation in the Media-2

Smash His Camera (2010) is a film that looks into the career of a celebrity photographer or paparazzi member Ron Galella. Ron Galella was willing to go to extreme lengths to get a photograph as a celebrity photographer. This definitely raised the debate of the ethical guidelines that came with paparazzi. Photojournalist’s were seen as being to aggressive when trying to get photos of celebrities. They were willing to sacrifice their reputation, put themselves in harms way, all to simply do their job. The quote that stuck with me from the movie, and to me explains why paparazzi do their job was when the movie talked about Andy Warhol. He stated that “My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous,” which is exactly to me what the public wants, and Ron Galella was willing to put himself into situations that allowed him to get these pictures. And that is why he was so successful. The question is how far is to far with these photojournalists when it comes to invading others privacy. Or are these photojournalists just exercising their first amendment to the fullest.

Historically there are many cases of paparazzi invading celebrity’s privacy. Including when Nicole Kidman won a case against the paparazzi in Australia. This is a good example of a photojournalist going to such an extreme that “[Nicole Kidman] was “really scared” when Mr. Fawcett chased her car across Sydney in 2005 (BBC, 2005). ” It came to the point that Nicole Kidman was scared for her well being because of the extremes that the photojournalist was going to, to get a photograph of her.

Obviously these situations can be handled in many different ways. If we are looking at these situations from the viewpoint of Ron Galella, it may not be seen as an act of intrusion. To Ron Galella he is simply trying to do his job to the fullest. He is trying to capture these photos of famous people doing unfamous actions. He had this amazing passion for photographing Jackie Kennedy and felt it was his right to do so. Looking at this from the perspective of Jackie, she obviously did not think the same way. She felt that she was wronged in the way that her privacy was taken away from her when Ron Galella was following her day in and day out to get photographs of her. It would have been more ethical for Ron to simply give Jackie her space, but that was not the view that Ron had on the situation obviously. For Jackie, she felt that Ron was going to such extremes that she felt harassed, and uncomfortable and that is when Jackie decided to sue Ron and resulted in a restraining order.

I believe this will have a huge impact on journalism in two different ways. Photojournalists may see how dedicated, and passionate Ron Galella was with his work and be inspired. This inspiration could see other photojournalists going to similar extremes to become a top-notch journalist. On the other hand, celebrities have become more aware of the extravagances that photojournalists have gone to and start to become more cautious. This caution could be exercised in many different ways like more security, and higher tolerance for what photojournalists are willing to do.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7266388.stm