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

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

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

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

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 an abstraction.
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

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

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

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.
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

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

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