I came across this film as I was doing the research for FOX ATTACKS! Iran. I had been searching with little success for information and footage of FOX before the current Iraq war — while much had been written about the supposedly "liberal" media's overall failure to do its job before the war, I could find surprisingly little that was specifically about FOX. Robert lent me a copy of War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, a terrific documentary that traces the history of the American media's unholy relationship with the government to convince US citizens to support wars, and I quickly realized that this movie had exactly the kind of footage I was looking for.

Robert got me in touch with Jeremy Earp, who co-wrote and co-directed WME with the film's producer, Loretta Alper. I was hoping to lock FA Iran in about a week, and Jeremy and his crew at the Media Education Foundation (which produced WME) worked with astonishing speed to get us the footage we were looking for. This is essentially a long way to explain my biases in writing this review — there would be no FA Iran if it wasn't for Jeremy and the folks at MEF, and I'm forever indebted to them. And Jeremy is a super cool guy, to boot. 

However, even if I had never had contact with Jeremy, I would be just as enthusiastic in my praise and admiration for War Made Easy. The film, based on Norman Solomon's book of the same name, expertly uses footage from World War II to present day to illustrate how both Democratic and Republican administrations have used the same set of propaganda tools and a compliant, fawning media to repeatedly push the US into war. Some of these tools, created by the government and internalized by the media, include comparing our enemies to Hitler, celebrating military technology (instead of the death and destruction it is designed to inflict), the silencing of dissenting voices, the sanitizing of the realities of war, and false pronouncements of America's reluctance to fight, even as it leads the attack. WME is occasionally narrated by Sean Penn, though an interview with Solomon provides the bulk of the dialogue.