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Bridges become frames for looking at the world around us.
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All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.
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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.
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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.
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America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.
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The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.
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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.
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Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
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Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.
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Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are.
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The web continues to be a source of important photographs you see nowhere else.
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It is not at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and how much public opinion influences the media.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Filmmakers who use narrators pay a price for taking the easy way: narrated films date far more quickly than films without narrators.
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The mainstream media showed, for example, no blood and guts resulting from the 9/11 attacks.
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I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.
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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.
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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.
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Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.