Bruce Jackson
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.
Bruce JacksonThe media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.
Bruce JacksonThe web continues to be a source of important photographs you see nowhere else.
Bruce JacksonThe US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.
Bruce JacksonWe 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.
Bruce JacksonWhat 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.
Bruce JacksonThe 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.
Bruce JacksonMost email I get is from readers suggesting links they think might be of interest or people submitting articles or ideas for articles.
Bruce JacksonWar 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.
Bruce JacksonThe mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.
Bruce JacksonThe media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.
Bruce JacksonTechnology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.
Bruce JacksonThe 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.
Bruce JacksonYou've gotten words about those American and Iraqi deaths and mutilations, but precious few images.
Bruce JacksonIt is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.
Bruce JacksonThe breakup of the Soviet Union meant for huge changes in the life of the native populations in the Siberian Arctic.
Bruce JacksonWar is grounded in the notion of triumph and defeat. It is zero-sum.
Bruce JacksonTelevision 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.
Bruce JacksonWar is an abstraction.
Bruce JacksonFilmmakers who use narrators pay a price for taking the easy way: narrated films date far more quickly than films without narrators.
Bruce Jackson