The US military still blames the media for stories and images that turned the American public against the war in Vietnam.
Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.
Television broadcasts have, in the main, been more suggestive, less specific, more distant in their images than the print press: often you knew that lump was a dead body only because a chattering reporter told you it was.
The media bring our wars home, but only rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom.
All too often, academic departments defend their territory with the passion of cornered animals, though with far less justification.
America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.
Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.
All governments in all wars have used all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the best possible light.
First, those images help us understand the general and specific magnitude of disaster caused by the tsunami. The huge outpouring of aid would not have happened without those images.
The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
Vietnam is often called our only uncensored war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the pictures and words.
