Bruce Jackson Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

War is an abstraction.

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.

War is big and there are only so many reporters and only so many places for their words and images to appear. Choices are made constantly.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.