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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.