Tom Brokaw Quotes

The coverage of Central America in recent months points up one of the ugly truths about the American press: the better the news, the less of it you get. As the war began to turn against the Communist guerillas in El Salvador, there was a palpable dip in the attention paid to it.

The media never covers all the evil wars that's promoted.

The Gulf War may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thanks to CNN and The Pentagon.

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

Journalists dedicate their lives to covering war - they make many personal sacrifices, and it's not something that's gender-based. In a place like Libya where there's heavy fighting, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

If we were in a similar circumstance in the future I would want to make sure that our reporting was at least as diverse as it was during this most recent war.

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.

Our embedded reporters during the war agreed to guidelines established by the military.

I covered the first Gulf War in Saudi Arabia and Israel for ABC News.

It's the first war we've ever fought on the television screen and the first war that our country ever fought where the media had full reign.

The Vietnam war was the first television war. You didn’t have to imagine it any more. You could see it.... Television changed the way war was covered forever.

I was born in '82 and there were these bizarre wars, explained through mass media in ways that made no sense. I remember watching the Gulf War through night vision. That was sold and propagated as a showbusiness moment for the news.

Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon.

Journalists go to press briefings at the Ministry of Defense in London or the Pentagon in Washington, and no critical questions are posed at all. It's just a news-gathering operation, and the fact that the news is being given by governments who are waging war doesn't seem to worry many journalists too much.

... war reporting is still essentially the same - someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people, be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen.

Some day I'd like to cover a war in a country as ugly as war itself.

I've been a radio and television news person since I was 19 years old. I'm 57 years old now. But the advantage is that I have studied, investigated, and reported over those years on nearly every major story from wars and recessions to grass roots local issues.

The Iraq War marked the beginning of the end of network news coverage. Viewers saw the juxtaposition of the embedded correspondents reporting the war as it was actually unfolding and the jaundiced, biased, negative coverage of these same events in the network newsrooms.

The First Battle of Fallujah was called off in part because of the intensity of non-U.S. media coverage of civilian casualties from outlets like Al Jazeera.

I think there were times when I first started out, when I was covering Iraq - I was basically living there in 2003 and 2004 - that car bombs and attacks became so the norm that it was weird for me to leave and realize that no one else actually cared about what was going on there.

We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.

I think Syria is often covered by phone. You have to talk to activists. You have to try to read the tea leaves. You have to talk to government officials. It's remote-control reporting in a way.

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

Of all times in time of war the press should be free.