“War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is chock full of evidence supporting the claim that the “liberal media” have, in fact, colluded for decades with both the White House and the Pentagon to present simplistic and flattering rationales in lieu of the complex and sometimes not-so-heroic reasons for American military intervention around the globe. This “easier version of war’s reality,” which opens Friday at Quad Cinemas, evolves on-screen via archival news clip footage, from the manufactured smoking gun of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution under President Johnson, through Nixon’s “Vietnamization” initiative, the deposing of Grenada’s Hudson Austin, Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and up to the current war in Iraq.

Senator Wayne Morse takes on President Johnson over Tonkin. Henry Kissinger backpedals on nuking Hanoi. Fox News commentators shout down dissenters like pro wrestlers addressing a booing audience prior to a steel-cage match. Vice President Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld prognosticate about American military fortunes in the Middle East with an unfortunate lack of prescience. Eason Jordan, the former CNN news chief, proudly describes clearing talking-head commentary with the Pentagon prior to the second Iraq war. Soon-to-be embedded journalists attend a pre-invasion boot camp and commentators enthuse about various weapons systems in a screen-friendly practice that Norman Solomon — upon whose book of the same name the film is based — calls “the worship of metal.” Assembled with partisan polish, the clips and sound bites of “War Made Easy” paint a sorry picture indeed of mainstream press and broadcasters’ accuracy and accountability when it comes to saber rattling and saber drawing.

Why, then, is the film so utterly unengaging? Although it offers a long view of the enduring romance between the Pentagon and the journalists who covers it, “War Made Easy” is rather short-sighted aesthetically. Directors Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp fall prey to a tendency among latter-day documentary filmmakers to emulate recent and successful styles of nonfiction filmmaking rather than to blaze their own trail. With its monotonous, vaguely ominous piano score, cascading vintage clips, and constant visits to Mr. Solomon opining in close-up, “War Made Easy” was clearly conceived while under the spell of Errol Morris’s “Fog of War.” But Mr. Solomon is no Robert McNamara. Though he is clearly well-informed on the subject, he fails to address the hows and the whys of the White House’s courting of news outlets. “War Made Easy” consistently fails to embrace the personal ironies and historical ambiguities that lent Mr. Morris’s film its considerable documentary muscle.

The directors’ choice of actor Sean Penn as an off-screen narrator further pushes the film, which was produced by Mr. Solomon’s Institute for Public Accuracy, into “preaching to the choir” territory. “Rarely, if ever, does a war just fall from the sky,” Mr. Solomon points out, as if this were an epiphany. The truth is that rarely, if ever, has any government taken the time and trouble to educate its populace on every strategic risk, ethical pitfall, and possibly suspect assumption that has led it to the brink of battle. Such is the nightmare and folly of “diplomacy by other means.” Politicians and news outlets alike have always been happy to prune fact-dense gray areas surrounding public policy into simplistic good-versus-evil narratives. In lieu of a very unlikely future that lays bare the actual foreign-policy agendas and sloughs off the shackles of infotainment generalities, Americans are stuck in the same position we’ve been in since Colonial days. When it comes to sorting out truth from fiction and policy from jingoism, the price of freedom indeed remains eternal vigilance.

Indignation and outrage are to agitprop what MSG is to Chinese food — an easy way to spice things up to a diverting but ultimately forgettable level of palatability. Despite Mr. Solomon’s calm, articulate, and academic delivery, “War Made Easy” runs on repetitive self-righteousness as much as on objective and intelligent analysis.