When I saw "Wag the Dog", of course I thought it was material some Hollywood screenwriter had dreamed up. I disliked the movie because I thought it was ridiculously over the top and had no instructive value.

Fast-forward to the present and we find out "They" do it in "real life". And not only that, I found out they've been deceiving on this scale for a very long time when I stumbled on this quote from George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War:

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”