This documentary explores how the same stories have been fed to the American public, to garner patriotic support for the many wars it has entered over the past 50 years. Narrator Sean Penn guides us through the general methodology which the US government and media have used to get the ball rolling in Vietnam, Kuwait, Korea, Iraq, Panama and Afghanistan, to name just a few, and a wealth of archived news footage is used to show how they keep the US public behind these wars.