Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.
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.
It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.
Technology has changed the way book publishing works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.
America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.
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.
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.
Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
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.
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.
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.
