David Shields Quotes

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.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.

There has been a reflex throughout the history of modern news: When the country goes to war, so do the major news organizations. They consider it ‘patriotic.’ But it is dubious patriotism that abandons citizens in unnecessary ignorance of critical information…The before-and-after picture of U.S. officialdom presents a stark lesson of the tragedies of war and propaganda repeated in the major media.

There are not enough people out talking about the President positively.

When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.

Throughout the lead-up to the war, CNN worked hard to air all sides of the story. We had a regular segment called Voices of Dissent in which we spent time covering antiwar protests and interviewing those who were opposed to the war with Iraq.

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.

The media doesn't always reflect reality.

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.

Most people learn all about the Second World War in school, or else, they see so many films put out by Hollywood, that it's easy to think we know exactly what happened.

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.

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.

You know journalists. You know the media. They are going to hang on to anything negative they possibly can.

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.

Fashion pictures show people looking glamorous. Travel pictures show a place looking at its best, nothing to do with the reality. In the cookery pages, the food always looks amazing, right? Most of the pictures we consume are propaganda.

CNN International, Al-Jazeera and BBC are the same in how they report mostly that America is wrong and bad.

A visit to Israel is always an experience in cognitive dissonance. The Israel you personally see and hear is so completely different from the Israel you read and hear about in the media.

The Iraq war fueled distrust of the press from both sides.

Effort should be made to see that the forum-type programs (the 'Today Show,' 'Meet the Press,' etc.) afford at least as much opportunity for supporters of the American system to participate as these programs do for those who attack it.

I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.

If you do a story about a British journalist rescuing a child from Sarajevo, then Sarajevo just becomes an exotic location, and the story's about this British journalist.

The job of the reporters in Vietnam was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America. To the ambassadors and generals, on the other hand, it was crucial that the news be good, and they regarded any other interpretation as defeatist and irresponsible.