The strangest example I have seen of this was during the bombing of Kosovo, when Albanians were fleeing on trains to the safety of Macedonia. Images of people packed into trains were repeatedly shown in the news media, and references to the holocaust were both explicit and implied. Quickly cemented into the American mind was the idea of Serbs being Nazis. This then justified the bombing that prompted the exodus in the first place, and completely overlooked the difference between riding on a train to a safe country, and riding on a train to a death camp. I question why we hear about massacres in Yugoslavia but not in Indonesia.
Ideology becomes very interesting to watch in the case of Iraq.
Official .support for Iraq ended over a decade ago and this problem now spans two Clinton administrations and the presidencies of both Bush the Elder and Bush the Lesser. This means that after our most recent bombing foray, we've been subject to a very narrow debate that essentially ceters around who's fault it is that we still have to deal with Saddam Hussein. No one, however, blames the United States for installing him in the first place. It is as narrow and misguided as the debate of Vietnam was in the mainstream media of the sixties and seventies. The question was whether or not we could win in Vietnam, whether or not we were using enough force.