Michael Winterbottom Quotes

America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

When you are covering a life-or-death struggle, as British reporters were in 1940, it is legitimate and right to go along with military censorship, and in fact in situations like that there wouldn't be any press without the censorship.

My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.

I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.

War coverage should be more than a parade of retired generals and retired government flacks posing as reporters.

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

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

In late 2009, I returned to Baghdad after a lengthy absence. I was living alone, in the Hamra Hotel, the twice bombed-out de facto international news bureau.

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

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.

Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.

Who has ownership over stories these days?

Yemen is one of the most dangerous spots in the world.

Stop exposing your children to danger by sending them to throw bombs and stones at soldiers and civilians.

Lebanon is not only burning buildings and people crying in the street. When you say 'Lebanon,' especially to foreigners, that's the first thing they think of.

The Kurds in Iraq just don't have enough military equipment - they also need humanitarian relief.

When 93 percent of our stories are told by white men, it's an issue. And if those white men go on and tell the stories the way they see their world, which is all white, then it's an even bigger problem.

I felt like I was definitely seeing something - the falsely gorgeous images of war, painted, almost invariably, in 'Times' combat photos.

Ethiopia is an island of stability within the Horn of Africa, which is a troubled region.

I was working in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, and I banged on the door and said, "I'm ready to go." And they said, "What's your combat experience?" I said, "Does my parents' divorce count? It was pretty rough." Then they said, "What's your reporting experience?" And I said, "I covered the women's volleyball team in college exceptionally well." The guy was like, "You are so not ready to be a war correspondent."

Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.

Aleppo is a disaster. It's a humanitarian nightmare.

I think Aleppo is a disaster, humanitarian-wise.

There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.

We asked for a delegation [of the Red Cross] in March 2013 when the first attack happened in Aleppo in the north of Syria ; they delayed it till just a few days before al-Ghouta when they sent those team, and the team itself said in its report that he did everything as he wanted. There was not a single obstacle.