Ashleigh Banfield Quotes

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.

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.

You have to pay attention to how a war appears on television these days, there’s no way around it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 don't think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don't think they should have been.

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

I've covered a couple wars and a lot of breaking news and a lot of cops-and-robbers situations.

During the war, in which several of our embedded correspondents were able to report from moving vehicles crossing the Iraqi desert, the use of technology made news gathering safer.

Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.

In November 2004, U.S. occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja. The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that's meaningful and important to people, but that's not my area of coverage.

The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.

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.

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.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

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.

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

There's a lot of peer pressure to not do positive stories out of Iraq... I think there's a sense that the administration got a pass during the hot days of war and now that the war is over it's time to even out the deck somewhat.