Bruce Jackson Quotes

In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

I'm not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can't be.

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.

The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.

At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.

We must have a free press. If we are to maintain democracxy as we know it, we must have a free and adversarial press.... That's how dictoators get power [by intimidating, restriciting and censoring the press.]

When you read Western press, you probably get a feeling that all Russian press is censored, there's no freedom at all, we can't say whatever, which is absolutely, absolutely, completely untrue.

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.

We need a free media, not just freedom of speech.

I think democracy's undermined when those who own newspapers fill them with trivia rather than real issues.

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.

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

The press is the enemy.

And in the Second World War, you didn't just read about it in the newspapers because you weren't allowed to read it in the newspapers. It was all censored, you know? So nobody knew what we were doing.

The media in America has become so cowed and compromised.

Routine is a declivity down which many governments slide, and routine says that freedom of the press is dangerous.

The United States is paradise compared to China, Russia, Ecuador and Cuba, with regard to the press. And with regard to secrecy and transparency.

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.

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.

To be honest with you, I worry about concentration of ownership in media, where you have a handful of media conglomerates largely controlling what we see, hear and read.