Why does the dog wag its tail? Because the dog is smarter than the tail. If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.

Wag the dog highlights the Medias ability to sell a fictional event as fact albeit in an extreme fashion, in fact an entire business is somewhat built around this with magazines such as Heat and OK. Each week stories adorn the cover of these magazines updating us on the scandalous events of the lives of so called celebrities. Headlines such as “It’s all over” are designed to grab our attention, designed to make us buy the magazine to find out more. But how much truth lies within these headlines? While recently discussing a similar topic on The Wright Stuff on Channel 5 presenter Richard Madeley told the story of walking into a newsagents and seeing the headline “Judy leaves Richard” something which he was unaware of. On reading the story inside he discovered however that the story was merely referring to a weekend trip his wife was taking without him. Quite a mundane story yet the headline suggested otherwise in an attempt to attract readers. They are developed for entertainment purposes rather than fact.

This is not a new phenomenon. In 1964 media buzz created a moral panic surrounding physical conflict between a small number of Mods and Rockers on Brighton beach. The story depicted that violence broke out on a mass scale with one paper stating that mods and rockers would “bring about disintegration of a nation’s character”. Stories relating to these subcultures were also misleadingly depicted with one headline reading “Mod dead in Sea” after an accidental drowning and other headlines containing the word violence when the main story portrayed no such thing. The media which had once encouraged these lifestyles by displaying tips on how to be a mod or rocker were now using the same culture they helped to create to sell newspapers.

This is not to say that all stories in the media are completely untrue. Stories are derived from fact but for entertainment purposes in some cases are dramatized. Would we be so eager to engage in media without the element of entertainment? The entertainment factor in a way turns serious stories into a drama, a soap opera so to speak creating a story we can engage with. In the media its important to be entertaining and first. Mistakes can be fixed afterwards.

“What difference does it make if it’s true? If it’s a story and it breaks, they’re gonna run with it.” – Conrad ‘Connie’ Brean Wag the Dog 1997