Bruce Jackson Quotes

I'm not besotted with the notion of being on CNN to the point that I'm going to suddenly morph into Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. I'm not a foreign correspondent.

American TV news is much more sophisticated. I think that American TV networks, it looks like, they invest a lot into news.

Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.

I'm a student of media and I've always been one. I'm fascinated by the way we make the world around us based on pictures and how can we improve our perception of this picture world.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone.

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.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.

Video looks like reality, it's more immediate, it has a verite surface to it. Film has this liquid kind of surface, feels like something made up.

When something is dramatized, it provokes a much more emotive response than just hearing a story on the news.

Pictures are so good at giving people information that they're not looking for.

'Frontline' does 10 news shows a year, so one a week is quite an undertaking.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

There's not a lot of music videos that are totally, totally disturbing.

Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

Twenty-four hour news delivers people who stand and talk to camera rather than deliver reported packages with their own camera crew where it's happening.

The only way to do news on television is not to be terrified of it.

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 journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

We report the news. Fox talks about the news.

I'm never aiming to make a movie like someone else's movie, but in order to describe a movie to someone else who hasn't seen it, you usually have to reference things they have seen.

The highest power of television journalism is not the transmission of information but the transmission of experience.

The news is the one thing the networks can point to with pride. Everything else they do is crap—and they know it

TV's job is to make you lean in, and a film's job is to make you lean back.