William Finnegan Quotes

Continuous coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf will resume in a moment.

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

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

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.

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.

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

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.

It seems a waste, to me, for the sake of getting more colorful news, to send these men, who are not in any way concerned with the war [Spanish Civil War] which is going on and the principles at stake, into such positions of danger. Three men, two Americans and an Englishman, have died, and with apparent pride a formal announcement is made to the effect that we should realize what dangers correspondents go through to give us the news. To be sure, these men, not only go willingly, but often are anxious for the assignment. Personally, I would prefer to have those three men alive and a little less accurate and colorful news, and I am quite sure the majority of the people in the United States feel the same way. If men must die, let it be for their own convictions, not because they are sent out so we may read or see something more startling in our newspapers and newsreels.

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.

Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things.

The photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.

Everything I can't see / is at least as real as what I can.

It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is.. we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

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.

During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information.

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

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.

The news is challenging right now. One hard thing about it is that often things don't lend themselves to good explanations or we don't have enough information. So we are sometimes in pretty murky waters, as everyone is. But it's an era where people's anxiety about what's going on and need to understand what's happening around them has created a real demand for news coverage that's dedicated to filling that need.

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.

... 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.

The worst of us is not without innocence, although buried deeply it might be.

I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war.

But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?

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

Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space.