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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Bridges are perhaps the most invisible form of public architecture.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.

War is an abstraction.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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