Bruce Jackson

Found 20 thoughts of 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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

Most email I get is from readers suggesting links they think might be of interest or people submitting articles or ideas for articles.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The breakup of the Soviet Union meant for huge changes in the life of the native populations in the Siberian Arctic.

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

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.

War is an abstraction.

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