Life & Mortality Quote by Bruce Jackson

Television, Jackson implies, doesn’t just report reality; it negotiates it. His most cutting move is the word “lump,” a deliberately unheroic noun that strips the scene of drama and reduces the supposedly definitive power of the image to a vague shape on a screen. Against the common belief that “seeing is believing,” he argues that TV’s visuals are often less informative than print because they arrive softened by distance, resolution, framing, and broadcast conventions. The camera shows you something, but it withholds the certainty that a sentence can deliver.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of authority-by-narration. “Only because a chattering reporter told you” points to a hierarchy: the image pretends to be primary, yet the meaning is handed down by the voiceover. The reporter becomes an interpreter, even a ventriloquist, animating an indistinct blob into “a dead body.” That word “chattering” isn’t neutral; it suggests noise, urgency, and the performance of knowing. TV, in this view, sells immediacy while smuggling in dependency.

Context matters: Jackson is writing from the era when broadcast news was becoming the default national conscience, especially for war, protest, and disaster. Grainy footage and tight deadlines made ambiguity routine. His intent isn’t nostalgia for print so much as a warning about the politics of mediation: when images are imprecise, whoever names them controls them. In a culture that treats video as proof, Jackson reminds us how easily “proof” becomes a story told over a blur.