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

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- 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.

- Bruce Jackson

All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

- Bruce Jackson

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

- Bruce Jackson

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.

- Bruce Jackson