The stories that sell America’s wars

 

How the Media Sell War

 
War is again spreading across the Middle East. The United States is exchanging daily airstrikes with Iran as the conflict spills across the Gulf. Israel continues its U.S.-armed military campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, and the occupied West Bank. And the United States and its NATO allies continue to pour weapons and military support into Ukraine’s spiraling war with Russia.

But these wars are fought with more than missiles, drones, and bombs. They’re also fought through language and images—through official claims repeated as fact, civilian deaths pushed from view, acts of aggression reframed as defense, and military escalation presented as reluctant, necessary, and inevitable.

For decades, MEF films have documented how U.S. news media help create the political conditions for war: amplifying government propaganda, marginalizing dissent, sanitizing violence, and shielding American power from sustained scrutiny. They’ve also explored how entertainment media embed militarism in the culture itself, exposing the Pentagon’s influence over Hollywood and the ways popular culture can glorify war, naturalize American military power, and turn violence into spectacle.

The ten films featured below trace these patterns across generations, from Vietnam and the Reagan era to the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and today’s widening conflicts. Together, they show that U.S. media complicity in war is not an occasional failure of journalism or popular culture. It’s a recurring feature of the American war machine, and a reminder that media can also become a powerful force for challenging it.

Ten films on media, militarism, and war

 

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