Bruce Jackson

“Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.”

“The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.”

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

“The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.”

“The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.”

“Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“You've gotten words about those American and Iraqi deaths and mutilations, but precious few images.”

“We entered the 20th century trying to deal with three ideas purporting to define or describe or explain three spheres of action, development and conflict: Darwin on the natural world, Freud on the internal world, Marx on the economic world.”

“The web continues to be a source of important photographs you see nowhere else.”

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

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

“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.”