Bruce Jackson Quotes

The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.

The fact that the Arctic, more than any other populated region of the world, requires the collaboration of so many disciplines and points of view to be understood at all, is a benefit rather than a burden.

The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened in that place at that time among those people.

Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.

Technology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.

It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.

I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.

Filmmakers who use narrators pay a price for taking the easy way: narrated films date far more quickly than films without narrators.

Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.

Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.

Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are.

All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.

All governments in all wars have used all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the best possible light.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead we've seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.

Well, I think everybody's a little jealous of the Vietnam Wall, even people from wars that already have good monuments. You have a monument like the Wall and nobody ever forgets your war, you can bet on that.

War is grounded in the notion of triumph and defeat. It is zero-sum.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.