Ideological narratives that shape public opinion can be seen as informative roadmaps created by the media and other prominent players such as spin doctors or famous politicians with a plan of affecting people’s way of thinking and intruding particular behavior. Ideological narratives are the comprehensive sets of ideas introduced in the written, oral, and video forms. They address the themes of gender, social status, race, nationality, religion, the relations between men and women, sexual relations, and the role and function of government among all. The main functions of ideological narratives are the interpretation of social, political, and economic contexts to common people, evaluation of the current state of affairs, orienting the masses, and giving people directions regarding their personal and public life.
The film “Wag the Dog” is a good example showing how ideological narratives work. The very title of the movie shows the absurd of the mechanism of people’s thought manipulation. Everyone knows that it is the dog that actually wags its tail; however, the film tells about such times when the tail may wag the dog. This figurative image in the title of the movie shows that politics often use made-up scenarios to perform manipulations with public opinion. In the film, the audience may well notice how political ideologists utilize a special technique to distract people. “Wag the Dog” shows how an influential political technologist initiates a fiction war in Albania to invade the news by the accounts of military actions. This spin doctor intends to turn journalists’ attention to the war because he hopes to divert common people from the presidential scandal so that his reputation could remain untainted before the elections.
The two documents of the class reading provide more illustrations to enlarge awareness on how ideological narratives function and who creates them. A key illustration of the way public opinion is shaped in the United States observed in the two readings is the opinion about Islam and Islamic countries after the events of September 11, 2001 and within the period of sixty years earlier this date. The author of the first document explains that his journalistic activity presented him with tools helping to identify connections between the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2011 and major political developments in the country (“Fixed Ideas 1” 6). A remarkable fact is that those days the government was trying to justify increased funding for the missile shield and other military expenses. In connection with the above-mentioned information, the author is making hypothesis that the terrorist attack was somehow directed by the government or at least tolerated by it in order to affect the tax payers’ decision concerning the increase of tax rates (“Fixed Ideas 1” 6). This hypothesis echoes the plot of “Wag the Dog”, which shows similar manipulation by the state with a purpose of influencing public opinion.
As shown in the class readings, ideological narratives come from three major sources – political leaders, private groups, and mass media. To prove this statement, “Fixed Ideas 2” quote Steven Weber, the director of the MacArthur Program of Multilateral Studies and a consultant on risk analysis on both the State Department and such private firms as Shall Oil, who have stated that the narratives shaping public opinion about the Muslim countries originated from three sources – prominent politicians Roosevelt and Bush, the mass media, and private organizations such as bookstores and periodicals (19, 20).
References
“Fixed Ideas 1”. Class reading (n. d.), 3-18. Print.
“Fixed Ideas 2”. Class reading (n. d.), 19-44. Print.
Wag the Dog. Ex. Prod. Barry Levinson and Robert De Niro. Los Angeles: New Line Cinema. 1997. DVD.