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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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

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

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled. ”

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. ”

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

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