Brandon T. Jackson's Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are.

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

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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