I saw part of a program about the Kennedy assassination the other day that got me curious about how the event was covered on TV as it happened. My mom, who was a teenager at the time, has told me she was home watching a soap and having lunch when she heard the news bulletin on TV saying Kennedy had been shot. Before it was confirmed that he was killed, my mom ran next door to the school where her mom was a history teacher to tell her what was happening.
YouTube has “As It Happened” clips of news events, in some cases hours-long recordings of TV broadcasts of major events, commercials and all. I watched some clips of the coverage of the Kennedy assassination from a couple of different networks. One (the ABC clip above) broke into a program with a bulletin saying the president had been shot in Dallas, announced that they’d keep viewers updated and then resumed broadcast of the program until there was more news to share.
While watching it, I was struck by a few things, including how obviously unprepared a major network was to broadcast breaking news 50 years ago. Also how incredibly sexist and stupid the commercials were.
My mom remembers being glued to the TV after the Kennedy assassination — she saw coverage of the murder of Oswald and watched Kennedy’s funeral, etc. In her recollection, the narrative about the events changed subtly over those days, and even now, she is convinced the government and media colluded to cover something up, though she’s not sure exactly what.
Of course, today, there is 24/7 coverage of every high-profile tragedy, whether there’s anything new to report or not. The “As It Happened” clips on YouTube include hours of coverage from 9/11/2001, which I suspect many of us watched in real time. If you look up coverage from the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 on YouTube, you’ll also see tons of conspiracy theory-focused clips.
The TROOF is out there, whether between commercials featuring housewives battling yellow waxy build-up on their linoleum (was that really a THING? Sweet Jesus! We feel we’re doing well if the sticky crap on the floor doesn’t pull our shoes off!) or nonstop hand-wringing from yammering-heads.
Media ref-working from the wingnut-plutocrat alliance shapes coverage of hard news events as well as politics, but aside from that, I’m wondering how the profound changes in the way the media packages and delivers major breaking news events alters the way we receive it and internalize it. Any thoughts on that?
Xecky Gilchrist
Also how incredibly sexist and stupid the commercials were.
The really astonishing thing is that they’re no better today.
I’m wondering how the profound changes in the way the media packages and delivers major breaking news events alters the way we receive it and internalize it. Any thoughts on that?
It’s slicker now, but not especially accurate. I remember hearing on 9/11 a bunch of wailing and “reports of 50,000 dead” and such.
Davis X. Machina
ABC was barely a real network in those days….
hitchhiker
We weren’t all that far from the FDR fireside chat days. My parents remembered those radio shows vividly, and we’d only had a TV in our house for five or six years when JFK was killed; I was 11. I think the news shows were just filmed radio broadcasts.
Post Kennedy funeral, my first memory of wall to wall live coverage of anything was the 1968 Democratic convention riots, followed by the moon landing in 1969, followed by the Watergate hearings.
Hell, we didn’t even have CNN until the first Gulf War, right?
Botsplainer
In Rob Ford news:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/15/rob-ford-scandal-toronto-residents-stand-behind-police-chief-bill-blair-over-the-fords-in-new-poll/
And 2% of those didn’t really believe it.
Betty Cracker
@Davis X. Machina: It shows! At one point an anchor is standing next to what looks like a copy machine with cords hanging around all over the place and random crew members milling about. I watched the CBS coverage too, and it was a bit more polished but still damn primitive.
Betty Cracker
@hitchhiker: I believe you’re right: Gulf War I put CNN on the map.
Death Panel Truck
None of the networks were prepared. Walter Cronkite did several minutes of voiceover until a camera was warmed up and ready to broadcast. On NBC, Frank McGee spoke to Robert McNeil using a “black box” attached to the phone receiver (which malfunctioned several times) so the viewer could hear what he was saying. At the moment they announced the president’s death, McGee had to repeat what McNeil was telling him from Parkland hospital.
ETA: NBC had the best coverage, IMO. They had Chet Huntley, who had the best-ever broadcast voice.
Jacks mom
Waxy buildup was a huge problem back then. The only thing worse was ring around the collar which could only be resolved with “an ancient Chinese secret” because apparently only they Asians could do laundry.
We’ve come a long way baby. Ha
Jay C
Thin and crude as the national media network(s) coverage in 1963 might seem to us living in the info-sodden 21st Century, one has to remember that the Kennedy assassination was really the first live this-is-not-a-drill “test” of it. It was the first national tragedy of the mass-media era: it 1) perforce, pretty much drove all other events out of the news; 2) required 24/7 coverage, if only for forms’ sake; 3) was the first real-time national “disaster” which could be, and was to a very large extent, experienced by every American virtually as it happened. In the half-century since, we’ve pretty much become (sadly) used to this sort of round-the-clock, real-time obsessiveness with major events (usually tragedies): in 1963, it was all still new territory: IMO, coverage of the Kennedy assassination set the template for media coverage (blathering time-wasting talking-heads and all): which we’re still using, to a large extent.
PS: for those that missed it, a nice essay on writing about Kennedy from the NYT Book Review 10/22/13
kathy a.
I was 6 when JFK was assasinated; it was, needless to say, the first time the nation stopped over a news event, and the only thing close in the intervening years was 9/11.
When JFK was assasinated, my mother was a political news junkie for that time, but the news then was mostly spread during evening news broadcasts and in the morning newspaper. I’m just guessing that people heard about it in radios in their cars, and that’s how my school found out; we had an all-school assembly. It was stunning that the funeral was broadcast live, in the middle of the day.
The news saturation is a clear difference from 50 years ago. Nowadays, you can get much more reportage of somebody’s “wardrobe malfunction” or a particularly flamy car crash — in real time! With even more dramatic tones from the reporters! — and, not sure that’s a good thing.
(To clarify — I’m an internet junkie, and like having news sooner. But there’s a definite down side.)
NotMax
The tragedy forced and sped up the maturation of TV as a news medium.
CBS and NBC had expanded their nightly newscasts from 15 minutes to a half-hour not quite 90 days before, so did have a somewhat larger staff to draw upon, not to mention greater budgetary resources, as per Davis X. Machina above. (ABC did not expand to 30 minutes until 1967.)
One thing I do remember was the sense of the obligation of on-air talent to inform and not speculate. There were many iterations that boiled down to “This is what we know, and this is what what we don’t know or don’t yet know, and we’ll stick to reporting on what we know and update that reporting as we learn and confirm more.”
maya
Is a presidential assassination something the media can be prepared for?
A unequivocal, YES with Obama in the WH. I’ll bet they have a pre-written script just in case, including ;” lone wolf”, “they were just exercising their Number 2 rights”, “Benghazi repercussion” and intellectual input from Rushbo, Robertson, Brokaw and Chuckie to flesh it out.
No need for Mop and Glow ads cause everyone has a maid these days.
I was 19 at the time and down at Camp Lejuene when the news came in via radio at the comm shack right after lunch. About an hour or so later a group who had been out on some field problem arrived in a 6x. When we told them what had happened one short-timer among them replied’ ” probably an x-Marine shot him”. I swear to dog.
Yatsuno
Both my parents can still tell me where they were when JFK was shot. I can tell you exactly where I was when the Challenger exploded. Both of these events defined our generations.
James E. Powell
I was struck by a few things, including how obviously unprepared a major network was to broadcast breaking news 50 years ago.
That was because the technology limited not just what the TV networks could do, but what they were used to doing every day. The radio networks were pretty good at “right now, on the spot” coverage.
Until the mid to late 80s, we always went to the radio for the immediate coverage, then later to the TV for pictures and reaction, then to the papers for analysis. Now we get all three within the first 20 minutes.
geg6
I saw it all in real time. I was about to have my 5th birthday (Nov. 24) and I was in afternoon kindergarten. I was getting ready to catch the bus, my mom was ironing in front of the tv, watching CBS soaps as she ironed. Saw a special report and my mom burst into hysterical tears. She wouldn’t let me go to school and older brothers and sisters were sent home from their Catholic school. We watched every minute of coverage and I vividly remember Oswald getting shot and the funeral. I completely empathized with poor Caroline, about my age, birthday close to mine, her daddy had just died and her mommy was so, so sad. It really made an impression on me and I’m sure it started my interest in politics. After that, I paid a ridiculous amount of attention to national news for a child of my age.
Mudge
I was in 9th grade English class. An upper level history came in and told our teacher, who immediately broke down. She was from Massachusetts and had voted for Kennedy for Senate and was a huge fan. We watched it on TV all weekend. First time I remember seeing Dan Rather. One of the largest discussions was whether they would cancel the NFL games that Sunday. They were all on Sunday back then for you young ‘uns. They didn’t. A black mark for Pete Rozelle.
Cassidy
I was sitting on the couch. Captain Price was dragging Yuri to the chopper. Yuri was trying to lay down covering fire as Sandman, Grinch, Truck fought off the advancing forces. When the RPG hit, Sandman waved off the chopper. The mine collapsed. RIP Team Metal.
shelly
I was 8. At the time we lived on a very busy main street. That weekend, during the broadcasts of all the ceremonies, I remember the street being so deserted, hardly a car going by.
As kids, we were in and out of the house that weekend, while our parents were glued to the coverage. But I was struck and still remember the images of the ‘riderless horse’ with the boots backward in the stirrups.
Bob In Portland
I was in eighth grade in Miss Maloney’s social studies class. They had us put our heads down on the desks and (I guess) pray for the President. After the news that he was dead they sent everyone home. It was weird, all the kids in shock over the killing of the President.
On Sunday I was visiting a friend from my church. We stopped shooting hoops to watch Oswald being moved from the police station. When Ruby gunned him down a hundred and fifty million people realized something was hinky.
hitchhiker
@geg6:
Yep. At my Catholic school it was near the end of the school day. A priest walked in, which was our signal to rise as one and say, “Good afternoon, Father.” He went to the front of the room and whispered something to the nun, who told us to sit. Within half an hour, the whole school had been led into the church next door to pray. Us girls all had to pin sheets of kleenex to our hair, because in those days females couldn’t have their heads uncovered in church. I think he was already dead by the time they sent us home.
I was walking up the hill to my house when I passed the mailman, who was openly sobbing as he pushed his cart along. A very strange day, and yes, I think every little girl in the USA had been primed to identify with Caroline. I know I did.
wasabi gasp
A couple of weeks ago, an older woman told me Bobby did it. My mouth opened a little, then I popped in another one of her delicious cream puffs.
cckids
Well, I was 9 months old, so no personal memories. My MIL used to talk for years about how she was watching the broadcast & “saw him shot live”. It took me a while (she talks a LOT) to realize she was talking about the Zapruder film; she’d apparently fused that into her memory of what she was actually doing that day.
Memory is a weird thing.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Mudge: It sure was, ironically it would be the success of the Dallas Cowboys in the years that follow that would transform Dallas from the city that killed JFK to the city that the world thinks of when it mentions Texas. (JR Ewing included)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
We watched the funeral at play school (what the places that would now be higher end day care were called – here at least – in the 60s) on a large console TV. I was distraught and inconsolable, because “he was our friend.” The ladies an Miss Lucy’s corrected me that “he was the President.” Still I sobbed; “he was in our kitchen.” They tut-tutted and tried to comfort me, and told my mother I’d kept insisting he’d been our friend and had been “in our kitchen,” to which she responded “I didn’t think she’d remember or recognize him.”
Those were different days, and he’d indeed stopped by the house at some point. We had a family friend who was running for Senate and also my father had known JFK when they were teens and my dad’s cousin, who was raised as his sister, went to school with some Kennedy girls and they often hung around each other’s houses. So dad would often visit the brothers at the pick up/drop off times. That may have had as much to do with JFK’s visit as the Senatorial candidacy of our friend.
nancy darling
I was 20 and in college at UNM. It was all black and white in those pre-color tv days.
I can’t think of the proper adjective to describe Jacqueline Kennedy in those awful days. She was only 33. She was so brave and strong—almost defiant in the way she held her head high. I really think her example held the country together.
She walked, flanked by Bobby and Ted, behind the caisson all the way from the Capitol Rotunda to the Arlington grave site. Leaders from all over the world walked behind her as did President Johnson. DeGaulle stands out in my mind.
The riderless horse, Black Jack, was immediately behind the caisson. He was a veteran of military funerals and I’m sure he was chosen for his temperament, but he sensed something different about this day. He danced from side to side and kept jerking at the lead. That young Old Guard soldier must have had a very sore arm at the end of the day.
The pomp and majesty of the funeral was cathartic for the nation. Jacqueline Kennedy gave us that.
mainmata
I was a kid when the assassination occurred while I was in our (parochial) school. The nuns herded the older primary school students into the auditorium and dragged in a TV that most of us could barely see to watch Walter Cronkite while they quietly underwent a controlled freak out; that much I could see. Days later, I sat in our basement watching the TV when Oswald was brought out to be transferred to county jail. I saw his murder live and was simultaneously shocked and confused as to what was happening before my eyes. I had never seen anyone really killed before (it was the TV age after all). It was several minutes before I raced up the stairs to tell my Mom what had happened.
smintheus
@kathy a.:
It started with the advent of national radio networks in the ’30s. For ex., there was the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s baby in ’32 and the discovery of his body, “the biggest story since the Resurrection” as Mencken put it. The entire nation stopped to listen to radio reports.
hitchhiker
@mainmata:
Oh, man. I also saw that happen in real time, and I was also alone . . . the sense of things haven fallen through some kind of crazy hole is hard to describe. What, what? What just happened? It was the launch of a zillion conspiracy theories.
low-tech cyclist
The decision to lock up for 75 years the unpublished parts of the Warren Commission records didn’t help fend off conspiracy theories either. While it may have been standard practice at the time, it wasn’t one that most people would have been aware of.
fleeting expletive
I was in high school. Walked back into the choral class and the pianist, a beautiful Senior, was sobbing. They sent everyone home and I watched tv for almost the entire weekend.
The exception was that Friday night, as I had reluctantly accepted a date with a boy I didn’t like but his mom and mine were coworkers. The date was a complete disaster, as all I remember was that he tore his pants on the car door so we had to go to his house and change pants. I have since then seen his headstone at the cemetery and apparently he became and accomplished and much loved man.
The assassination killed something in the US population’s psyche, I think.
smintheus
@low-tech cyclist: It’s not as if there aren’t good reasons to look for a conspiracy. Has the discovery of Malcolm Wallace’s fingerprint in the Book Depository ever been explained?
Dead Ernest
I was 8. Our teacher was called out of the room and we were left alone for a long time. She returned, crying, told us to go home.
There were no school busses.
Walking home along Wilshire Blvd, a busy LA street, there was little traffic. I saw adults crying as I walked past them.
Later, home and glued to the TV, I watched as Oswald was shot before my eyes.
Back then, the network news, I simply knew, the news Was the Truth. Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, simply were telling me the truth. Inconceivable that this wasn’t the case.
As news ‘evolved’ – one of the harshest steps of my adolescence was seeing the News, what had been The Truth of my childhood, turn into the representation of everything that is bad about us human’s capacity for self deception, for selfish manipulation of others, for desperately digging in and holding on to what one feels they need the ‘truth’ to be.
Sigh. Time for ice cream.
kathy a.
@smintheus: True. In retrospect, I should have specified TV news.
Someone mentioned Challenger, and I remember that, too — in the courthouse where I was working, a TV was dragged out in the hallway — but everything didn’t just stop.
Betty Cracker
Fascinating comments as usual, folks. I hadn’t realized TV news was so much in its early stages in 1963. My mom lived in rural FL at the time and said many people were happy about Kennedy’s death because they hated him so much. It made her very sad, though. She would grow up to be a hippie chick a few years later, but at the time, she was a kid and mostly perceived the Kennedys as glamorous celebrities.
raven
I was a sophomore in high school in history class. Five years to the day alter my great friend was killed in Operation Meade River. I am one who does not believe her would have lived if Kennedy had.
Neddie Jingo
My third birthday, and my first concrete memory. My parents telling me they were canceling my birthday party, that I had to be “a brave little man.”
This event set off a decade of me wandering around in something like a clueless little-boy fog, a giant question mark floating over my head, bewildered at the headlines and photos on the front page every day — cops beating black people, students rioting, soldiers dying. Johnson and Nixon on TV, clearly lying about something or another, but just what that might have been, or what the actual truth was, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out.
Only many years later did I come to understand that poor little underinformed me had lived right through the genesis and flowering of Nixonland, without anybody bothering to explain to me (if they even understood, themselves) just what the hell was going on. I still often feel that I understand it imperfectly, but, thank you Rick Perlstein, I understand better than before.
All of this groping toward an explanation of why I wept like a baby on the day of Obama’s first inauguration, after I worked so hard to help make it happen. Not an end, not really a beginning either, but at least a chapter closing — in a book that began for me on November 22, 1963.
We ain’t done with the book, though. Lots of chapters yet to come.
HeartlandLiberal
I was a teen, in second year Latin class. As we started class, a redneck kid who always carried around George Wallace stickers came in, announcing in a rejoicing voice that Kennedy had been shot. My Latin teacher was a wizened, ancient, diminutive crone of a woman, with a weak heart. I thought she was going to have a heart attack on the spot.
I remember how the world was black and white then, and how for the next few days we were glued to the black and white news on the TV, as we watched the history that was happening reported to us, from Walter Cronkite’s pronouncement that the president is dead, through the shooting of Jack Ruby, and televised funeral and mourning.
About 15 years ago, I was in Dallas on business. I visited the Schoolbook Repository, and the museum on the floor Oswald shot from. I wrote in the visitors log that this event was the moment in my life when all innocence for me as a citizen, and for us as a nation, was wiped away clean. And we have never known the hope and positive attitude towards ourselves or our government and its leaders since.
Birthmarker
I had just turned 10 and was out of school that day to go to the doctor. We came in and turned on the TV and heard the initial reports from Cronkite, then of course the report of death. My mother cried briefly. We saw Oswald murdered on Sunday morning-supposedly the first murder televised live…
debbie
I was in 6th grade and was sent home after the announcement came over the PA. The TV was on all weekend. The only voices came from the TV.
I remember two things that would never happen today: There wasn’t incessant chatter from the anchors and reporters; the pictures spoke for everyone. The other is that it didn’t matter what your politics were, you were shocked, silent, and grieving. My parents were staunch Republicans, but they were as sstunned as everyone else. That’d never happen today. Somewhere, there would be celebrations.
Napoleon
my mom was home with 2 year old me waiting for the TV repairman to show up. He is the one who told my mom, who initially took it as a really poor joke.
Someone mentioned this upthread but I was amazed learning a few years ago that CBS could not go on the air since cameras in those days, using tubes and all, took time to warm up, and they didn’t bother to have one warmed up on standby.
Napoleon
my mom was home with 2 year old me waiting for the TV repairman to show up. He is the one who told my mom, who initially took it as a really poor joke.
Someone mentioned this upthread but I was amazed learning a few years ago that CBS could not go on the air since cameras in those days, using tubes and all, took time to warm up, and they didn’t bother to have one warmed up on standby.
MattR
Before my time. For others like me who are too young, this recording from the Boston Symphony Orchestra of the news being broken by the conductor is interesting/instructive because it includes an audible audience reaction, which I can’t recall hearing in any of the other clips.
Carl Weese
I was a first year student playing clarinet in the Seton Hall Prep band at a Pep Rally in the big college gym for the weekend’s football game. The rally program was interrupted when the priest who was second in command at the high school (official position: Dean of Discipline—think about it) to announce that the president had been shot. Fr. Giblin was an adamant arch conservative who didn’t think his views should be kept out of pulpit or classroom. He hadn’t been fooled for a minute by Kennedy’s nominal Catholicism into supporting someone beneath a level of conservatism that would do a current teahadist proud. But Fr. Discipline was utterly devastated, stunned, that “the president” had been assassinated. This hyper macho man was clearly struggling not to break down in front of his school’s student body. He was updated by a runner with the confirmation of Kennedy’s death, and launched into a very long prayer cycle. I’ve been an atheist for so long that it’s hard to remember the category, but I think it was a series of novenas that went on for at least another hour. No notes. He probably didn’t need a missal to do his daily office.
Emotional moments pass. He strongly pushed the student body to support Goldwater in the next election.
Tripod
@Betty Cracker:
From 1950 to 1960 TV household marketshare went from 9% to 87% Concurrently, the radio networks (and movie industry) were imploding. It was a brave new media world.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@debbie: I’m trying to remember who on here commented that while teaching a junior high class somewhere in Texas, s/he watched the students stand an cheer when the news was announced during class. Horrific image.
Patricia Kayden
Wow. Really enjoyed all of your comments. This entire thread would make a great book. Kids in the distant future would love to read first hand accounts of important historical events.
Keith G
I was 5 yrs old then and experienced all the oft-noted experiences.
Yes, it was a seminal event. Yes, it was formative in my politics and activism.
Yes, when I was much younger, I made all the relevant pilgrimages – Brookline and Hyannis…and Arlington. Drove down Elm Street but didn’t get out to look.
No, I won’t be watching any of the coverage. The longer I live, the more certain I am that we really haven’t moved that far away from Hobbes natural state mankind, living lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Except that we have better shoes.
debbie
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
They probably grew up to be the people shrieking outrage over Mooslums dancing in the streets after 9/11.
I grew up in Ohio, which was pretty conservative and I saw nothing like that.
Jennifer
Good rule of thumb: when they put together theme music for any particular news event, it’s time to stop watching.
Hell, even the Weather Channel does theme music for big storms now. I think on average CNN has the theme music figured out within 6 hours of any major event.
Mike G
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
There are parts of this country that would react that way if the same unspeakable event happened today.
And if you talk to them they’ll proclaim what great “patriots” they are.
Tokyokie
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I was in Oklahoma rather than Texas, and yes, a kid in my class jumped from his seat and cheered when the principal made the announcement. (The principal came on the PA to announce JFK had been shot, and, a few minutes later, to announce that he was dead; I can’t remember which announcement drew the cheer.) Even my fourth-grade teacher, a stone-cold racist from Louisiana, was taken aback by the guy’s behavior.
BobS
I was a week away from my 9th birthday when JFK was killed- school was let out early and my mom was waiting outside in the car to pick up my younger brother and me. What affected me most about Kennedy’s assassination- then & maybe even now- was that it was the first time I’d ever seen my mother crying.
My dad was in a bowling league on Sunday mornings- he’d take either my brother or me every other week, and we’d get to bowl ourselves afterwards. I was sitting at the bowling alley grill eating french fries as I watched Lee Harvey Oswald murdered live in black and white.
lgerard
I am just finishing the recently published book, Dallas 1963, and am struck by the incredible sense of foreboding that surrounded Kennedy’s visit, both on the part of Dallas residents, and those surrounding Kennedy. It seemed that many, many people were sure that this was a bad idea and that something was certain to happen, particularly after Adlai Stevenson’s visit had provoked a riot a month earlier. Dallas was the epicenter of the far right wing and very few had the courage or wisdom to oppose the fanatics.
mclaren
As someone who was alive and watching TV (pre-kindergarten) when the Kennedy assassination was announced, I can testify that, yes, the way news is packaged and delivered today has had a profound effect on Americans’ perception of their society.
First: a news bulletin broke into the program I was watching to announce that the president had been killed. I told my mom. She didn’t believe me. “Those kinds of things don’t happen,” she said, and went back to her cooking.
That was it. No wall-to-wall news coverage, no non-stop “updates.” Just an announcement that the president had been killed, and then the regular TV programming resumed.
The next thing you have to understand is prior to the Kennedy assassination in November 1963, TV news lasted 15 minutes. It was a guy sitting around reading the AP wire and Reuters with a sound effect of a teletype in the background. According to wikipedia, TV news expanded from 15 to 30 minutes in September 1963 — but it wasn’t called the nightly news, it was called “The Huntley-Brinkley Report.” Those were two reporters who used to take turns reporting news and always ended with the slogan “And that’s the way it is today, [insert date].” That ending slogan sums up the era — the way the networks reported the news was the truth, no questions, no alternative viewpoints. Imagine how well that kind of tag would go down today!
The second thing you need to understand is that the Vietnam war absolutely made TV news in the same way that the first Iraq war made CNN. TV news was a minor loss-leader service on all three major TV networks until LBJ ordered U.S. troops to invade Vietnam. Then, families were glued to the TV every evening, and the networks started to make serious advertising bucks off the nightly TV news.
The third change came during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, when an ABC late-night 11:30 PM special on the crisis (airing every day) evolved into the late-night TV news show Nightline. That was the first example of nightly news coverage outside the regular prime-time evening news slots and it opened up more sources of information for the average person. Nightline also opened up TV news to the kind of paid propagandists we now see routinely on TV news — state department “experts” (translation: political whores paid to lie in the service of the administration), military ‘consultants’ (translation: retired colonels and generals paid to lie in the service of the administration) and “special consultants” (translation: academic hacks paid to lie in the service of the administration). Prior to Nightline, TV networks didn’t hire these kinds of paid whores and pass their lies off as actual news.
The fourth big change came from the launch of CNN, which was struggling until Desert Storm. Wolf Blitzer is a worthless hack who parrots the administration line no matter how outlandish, but he made his rep and made CNN a fortune by reporting live from Baghdad during the bombing in the first Iraq War. CNN was a huge change because it was the first 24-hour news network and very quickly CNN wound up driving America’s foreign policy agenda. Presidents discovered very quickly that if CNN featured lots of starving kids and snipers and corpses in some third world country, the public started to demand that we do something about it. CNN is largely why Bush 41 got into the tarpit of Somalia — fortunately, Clinton was smart enough to get the hell out after summarily declaring victory and evacuating (which we should do in Syria, Afghanistan, etc.).
The launch of Faux News represented the last stage of development of TV news. As everyone knows, Faux News is not actual news: it’s a Leni-Reifenstahl-style propaganda machine disguised as a news network. Ronald Reagan’s former campaign manager Roger Ailes runs Faux News so there’s no possibility of unbiased coverage of anything.
The single biggest change driven by this 24-hour news cycle is the level of hysteria among Americans. People in America today are driven to wild panic by the ever-increasing tempo of news bulletins. I clearly recall the wild hysteria of the CNN coverage of 9/11 — a big red banner AMERICA UNDER ATTACK ran as a crawl under every news story for months and non-stop replays of the two jets crashing into the twin towers, together with crazy amounts of bizarre speculation about what was likely to happen next from grossly unqualified minor academics and think-tank whores. All the speculation turned out to be bullshit and the non-stop replays of the footage of the jets crashing into those two skyscrapers served no purpose other than to inflame the general panic and raise the network’s ratings. Every single prediction made in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack was completely bullshit: “there will be more attacks” (no there weren’t), “this is the start of world war four!” (Tom Friedman: no it wasn’t, he was out of control and hysterical), “We need to prepare for a major assault on this country by worldwide terrorist groups” (no we didn’t), “many more Americans will be killed by terrorists in the next few years” (nonsense, never happened), “America’s very existence is threatened by this new global terrorism!” (unbelievable tripe).
In reality, two jets flew into two skyscrapers. Then, nothing. End of story. But the wild hysteria continued for month after year after decade.
If you want to know you’re living in an East-German style police state under effective martial law with absurd agencies like the TSA and the DHS doing crazy things like shutting down train stations to check for bombs or forcing all airline passengers to take shampoo bottles out of their luggage, modern TV news is the answer.
Bob In Portland
Sometimes my gal and me reminisce about the days when there were three channels on our black and white and you had to actually walk across the room to change channels.
David Koch
In an interview Walter Cronkite said the problem was it took a long time for a camera to warm up in those days.
Mustang Bobby
First, I’m impressed how many of my fellow B-J commenters are of an age that they remember the assassination. I thought these intertubes were dominated by the kids who keep getting on my lawn.
I was in Grade 6. We had a kid in our class named Matt Kennedy, so when a classmate told me “Kennedy’s dead,” I wondered what had befallen him on the soccer field. Then we were assembled in the gym, the principal announced the news, and we were all put on our school buses to go home.
The next three days are like a newsreel to me in shades of grey and the flickering of the TV: the arrival of Air Force One in Washington, LBJ’s speech on the tarmac, the White House draped in black, then the funeral march, the broken Taps, the eternal flame. Oswald’s murder on live TV was, as Jackie Kennedy put it, “just another awful.”
It was the first time TV really did cover breaking news, and they’ve taken all of their lessons from it, it seems.
lgerard
Yet Jack Ruby shooting Oswald was televised live….something you would never see today
gelfling545
I was 13. Sister Mary Edmunda, the principal, announced on the loudspeaker that we would now stop work to offer a prayer for the President, who had been shot. I don’t think death had been confirmed at that point. We stayed in school that day but they did close school for a few days. I watched the news coverage obsessively and thus saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot on live feed. It was a warm autumn & I walked for hours with my best friend as we tried to make some sense of it all. I remember that we were appalled that while school was out, Bingo went on as usual. There were commemorative magazines on sale at the news stand within a day or so & we spent our allowances on them.
Cassidy
I’ve learned that any knucklehead who compares the US to East Germany is a simpleton and not with trying to engage in adult conversation. You are welcome to enjoy your revisionism on your own.
MikeJ
@Mustang Bobby:
I think my parents were in high school, or perhaps just out. I was still years away from the birthening, and I’m of an age that I’m yelling at people to stay off my lawn.
debbie
@Tokyokie:
I will say that young kids absorb their parents’ politics like sponges. My dad must have drugged my cereal because I wanted Nixon to win in 1960 (I was 7). Of course after watching the Kennedy inauguration (in the basement by myself), I was all for Kennedy. Not too many years later, though, when we were “discussing” Nixon, I struggled not to lose my temper and call my father a capitalist pig. Such are the ways of youth.
Dee Loralei
I have no memories of my own from that day, I was less than 18 months old, but it’s interesting reading y’alls.
Mudge
@David Koch: Not much in the way of satellites either. I remember the first live transatlantic broadcast on was it Telstar? around that time. No solid state electronics except maybe a transistor radio (there’s an archaic term). So they were not only unprepared logistically, they did not have the technology. There was, for example, “no instant replay”, there were no video cameras as we know it. There were no truly mobile cameras, just film, which had to be developed. I find it amazing that the tragedy was covered as well as it was. Lots of new ground broken on the fly.
Tokyokie
@mclaren:
That probably wasn’t a sound effect, it was probably the real thing. When I first started in the newspaper biz back in 1977, we had a full bank of AP and UPI wire machines near the copy desk, and even though they were enclosed in a separate room, they were still quite noisy. (And besides, we needed to be able to hear them, because the more bells, the higher the priority the story. If we heard the wire machine ding several times in a row near deadline, the news editor would slam down his pencil and ask the wire editor to go check the ticker to see what it was, and then start redrawing the front page.) The newsrooms for a network TV program likely had even more wire machines than the paper where I started did, so the wire-ticker sound was probably even more persistent.
MikeJ
@Cassidy: I had to unblock to see what sort of stupid was said. Oh my. A two hour clip of non stop coverage at the top of this page and yet it claims that regular TV resumed after a quick, “the presidents dead.”
Don’t know why I bothered looking. Re-pied it.
mclaren
@lgerard:
It wasn’t just a vague “sense of foreboding.” Prior to JFK’s visit to Dallas, posters were put around the city reading WANTED FOR TREASON and listing a bunch of supposed “crimes” of which Kennedy was allegedly guilty.
This is why I just laugh and laugh when people tell me “political polarization has never been as bad in America as it is today.” Don’t try to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs, kiddies. I was alive in the sixties, and the Goldwater extreme right was far more rabid than today’s Tea Partiers. And yes, those WANTED posters which basically threatened the president of the united states with death as a supposed traitor were put up by the Goldwater faction of the Republican party. That’s how crazy the Goldwaterites were. Goldwater was not the kindly gentle reasonable fantasy figure revisionist histories have turned him into: Barry Goldwater openly suggested using nuclear weapons against the Viet Cong in 1964. That’s why LBJ’s “daisy” ad in the 1964 presidential campaign was so devastatingly effective.
Goldwater and his followers advocated everything the Tea Party does today, but more forcefully, and with a strong implied threat of assassination and riots and mass violence if their demands weren’t met. Goldwater vhemently opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he opposed Brown v. Board of Education de-segregating the schools, he proposed using nukes in Vietnam, he was basically John McCain plus Sarah Palin on steroids and PCP.
So those of you who wail and whine about how terrible political polarization is today in 2013, buck up and get a grip. It was much much much worse in the sixties, and we survived that Hell Decade, so we’re gonna make it through the 2010s okay as a country.
fleeting expletive
I think I discovered CNN when John Lennon was killed. I had a newborn and thus up all hours to feed him.
In the mid-seventies I had a black and white tv with a wired remote control, big tech improvement. I’d race home from work to watch 30 minute episodes of Star Trek. We lived in Dallas when I was 6, we didn’t have a television then but the other tenant of the duplex had a tv and would let me come over to watch Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse club.
Tokyokie
@debbie: My parents were conservatives (especially my mother), and I, too, soaked up their beliefs. (I didn’t figure out that conservatives are generally full of crap until I was in high school.) And although I’d been brought up to dislike JFK, I at least had the sense not to cheer his demise.
The guy who cheered the JFK news was a lower-middle-class kid and not especially bright (I’d actually heard him use the puppy-ate-my-homework excuse a couple of years earlier) in a school in which nearly everybody else was upper middle class. I still find it remarkable that at age 9, he was already cheering against his best political interests.
mclaren
@MikeJ:
Thanks for displaying your gross ignorance. You assume that everyone could get all three TV networks on their rabbit ears back in 1963, or that everyone had cable TV, or that people had UHF (UHF stations didn’t even exist in 1963).
The type of TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination strongly depended on where you lived, because our full immersion media environment today is very different from the spotty reception using rabbit ear antennas the average person got in 1963, especially in rural areas — like the rural area where my parents lived.
Maybe in major cities the news coverage of JFK’s assassination was different. I can’t speak to that. I was living in a house at the end of a mile-long gravel road 10 miles outside a small town in 1963 — a house that didn’t even have a number address, because we were the only house at the end of that gravel lane. We got letters addressed to [us] at [name of the lane], with no number.
I’m guessing that people living in Los Angeles or New York City or San Francisco saw much different TV coverage on the day JFK was killed, but there’s no way to be sure. All I can say is the TV coverage I saw.
BillinGlendaleCA
@MikeJ: Pretty much what I did as well.
I have no memory of Kennedy’s death, though I was 2 months from my 4th birthday. My mom didn’t find out until my dad got home from work probably about 8 hours latter.
kathy a.
@debbie: Yes, my parents were republicans, too; and once I started absorbing the shock that the President could be killed (how was that possible?), I was shocked that even my mom was crying. She pretty much hated JFK, right up until then.
Stella B
@Mustang Bobby: I’m surprised by the same thing. JC has about three readers under fifty, but potentially a few more than that who didn’t go to parochial school. I was only four and two months away from learning to read (and two years short of CCD) when the Bozo show was interrupted for a special announcement. It’s really my earliest memory. My dad stayed home from work to watch the funeral which was amazing at the time. My parents hated the Kennedys at the time although they have since come to their senses and switched over to the side of goodness and light.
Tokyokie
@mclaren: People who lived in single-family homes in the suburbs tended to have good (for the time) TV reception, because they could hook up a rooftop antenna. But even then they were limited to the three major networks and maybe an education channel (as PBS stations were called back then). Using rabbit ears meant tweaking the antenna constantly throughout the program.
Tehanu
@mclaren:
That’s true in the sense that the hysteria is much more frequent and widespread. But we were just watching a documentary about the Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 which was perhaps the first instance of mass panic driven by what appeared to be, but wasn’t actually, news. I think you’re right, however, in pointing out that the general level is so much higher now.
Re the Kennedy assassination: I was in my junior-year English class when a runner from the principal’s office brought in a note to the teacher, who up to that point I didn’t particularly like as he was rather strict and sarcastic. As he read the note I saw him turn absolutely ashen — the blood literally drained out of his face — and then he told us the news. After class I went to the girls’ restroom and stood in there with about 10 other girls, all crying our eyes out. The whole weekend, my parents had the TV on the entire time; I got up on Sunday morning just in time to see Ruby shoot Oswald. After that we were all beyond shock, we were just numb. I still cry every time I think of John Kennedy Jr doing his little salute.
NotMax
@David Koch
One reason TV stations showed the test pattern when programming ended was so that a camera or two could be kept on and not require the warm-up time.
Some of the early cameras utilizing the plumbicon or first-generation orthicon tubes required as long as 24 hours to warm up (we had one of those dinosaurs in the TV studio at my high school).
R-Jud
What struck me about watching the clip in the original post was that as soon as they had reports from the priests who administered the rites to Kennedy that he had died, they cut to a photo of the president titled: “John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963”. While there was a lot of fumbling around in the broadcast before that, the quickly-slapped-together graphics are the kind of thing you’d see today.
JoyfulA
I was sitting by the TV, drooped on the sofa arm, as Oswald was being escorted from the jail. On live TV, he was shot.
None of it made any sense, and it still doesn’t.
NotMax
@mclaren
And leave us not forget George Wallace’s running mate in ’68, Curtis “Bomb them back to the Stone Age” LeMay.
oldswede
@Mudge:
I interned in the news department of a local tv station in the summer of 1966. The station had just gotten its first video tape player, a monster using tape at least an inch wide. No video cameras. It was for recording broadcasts, mainly.
All the news footage was shot using 16mm film which was developed off site and rushed to the studio for editing. The film had to be cut and spliced by hand. This was the state of the art locally at the time.
oldswede
satby
I remember the anti-Catholic bigotry on full display before Kennedy’s election; the insinuations that he would answer to the Pope and not to the Constitution. As Irish Catholics in Chicago, JFK was a symbol that we too were fully American, finally a Catholic could be elected President. I was 8 when he was assassinated, like others have said we all knelt and said a decade of the rosary before being sent home from school. I remember the big black blotches on Jackie Kennedy’s pale dress; her husband’s blood. John-John, practically a toddler at only 3, saluting his father’s casket. Empty streets, like the entire nation had frozen in place. And yes, pictures with no sound other than the drums and the clipping of the hooves of the riderless horse. Because the pictures on the TV were enough, and no one needed or wanted the solemnity broken by constant prattle.
NotMax
@efgoldman
Yup. In those days before multi-tentacled and distant or diffuse corporate ownership, a Bill Paley or David Sarnoff could say “Make it so” and it happened lickety-split.
Sondra
I was in Junior High School when Kennedy was shot and the announcement came over the loud speakers.
We all went to the auditorium to await further news. At first we didn’t know how badly he was wounded, but the news came pretty fast that it was fatal.
As I recall events, we were too stunned to care much about the little details and there was wasn’t much speculation. We just watched as Jackie, covered with his blood, got off of the plane with LBJ and we watched as he took the oath of office.
The weight of the loss was just too stunning to most of us, and I don’t want to re-live it now.
Chris
@satby:
Generally from people who think the president should answer to their religion (however they define it) more than the Constitution, I believe. “Christian nation,” etc.
Jay C
@lgerard:
I wouldn’t be so sure: of course, nowadays, there would be a clip up on YouTube with ten million hits before Oswald’s body was cold.
hitchhiker
Just wanted to say thanks to all the youngsters here for being patient with us oldies.
Also yes to whoever said upthread that Jackie Kennedy showed the way through with unbelievable strength.
Which is what made it so bizarre when a few years later she up and married that Greek tycoon and left the country with her children. He was 62 years old.
JoyfulA
@mclaren: There were UHF stations in the early 1950s. I used to watch “My friend Irma” and wrestling on my grandparents’ channel 27 as a little kid.
And we had cable at my house by 1954. Of course, it was about the first cable setup in the country—a TV store put an antenna on a mountain to boost sales—but we got Washington, Baltimore, Lancaster, Philadelphia, and I think New York.
SiubhanDuinne
@mclaren:
A couple of minor corrections:
Actually, H-B always signed off “Good night, Chet.” “Good night, David. And good night for NBC News.” (It was Walter Cronkite on the rival CBS who signed off with “And that’s the way it is….”
Secondly,
Agree with your assessment of Blitzer’s hackitude, but he’s not the one who reported live from Baghdad during Desert Storm. That would be Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett. I won’t swear that Wolf never held a microphone in Iraq during the first Gulf War, but he was mostly anchoring from the safety of CNN studios, not from the genuinely perilous Rashid Hotel.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
Please tell me that you’re committed to that position. Please, please, please.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Am so old I remember when the dial on the TV began at channel 1, not channel 2.
some guy
@Cassidy:
why do you conservatives always feel it is your job to determine the accceptable parameters and acceptable analogies.used in a discussion? why not go fuck a duck, asshat.
Cacti
@smintheus:
And thereafter, Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Keith G
Since 1963 is one of the background topics of this thread, Spotify has a 215 song (9 hr) playlist called Best Songs of 1963.
From Puff the Magic Dragon to It’s My Party. There are also cuts from Charles Mingus and John Lee Hooker.
MikeJ
@some guy: Probably because you’d have to be brain damaged to compare snooping email headers to death squads.
some guy
a really great thread, with many excellent details and rememberances for us younguns. But like all great BJ threads, it can’t help but be marred by the usual Center-Right asshats telling ius what should or shouldn’t be allowed . jeebus
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Cacti:
Not so much, really. There were newsflashes, wire reports coming in from Hawaii and D.C.. It wasn’t minute-by-minute stuff. There just weren’t a ton of reporters in Hawaii, there was no satellite technology available for quick dissemination of the news.
Mike in NC
I was 9 years old and attending parochial school when the Mother Superior came on the intercom to announce that the president had been shot. We were sent home with church bells ringing and one of the streets I had to pass was at the time called Oswald Street in Roxbury (Boston) and there was talk for years later about changing the name.
Jay C
@mclaren:
.
Not quite so.
But you are quite right that TV coverage varied greatly by geographic region: I was brought up (since 1952) in Los Angeles – one of the few media markets in the country that had its “full” allocation of seven VHF stations – and always thought there was something weird about those stations with unusually-high numbers. But yes, in 1963, they would have been few and far between. As was a lot of TV until fairly recently – until the satellite era.
Betty Cracker
@hitchhiker: I read somewhere that Onassis made her feel safe. He was so incredibly rich that he could buy space and isolation, which she desperately needed for herself and her kids. Sounds like a plausible theory to me.
smintheus
@JoyfulA: Do you live near Schuylkill County?
Cassidy
@some guy: Why do you insist on revising history to fit your narrative? If one of us is showing a conservative trait, that is it. Seriously, how insulated, entitled, and stupidly offensive do you have to be to compare our current society to East Germany? Just the fact that you can write that kind if dumb shit in a blog comments section and not have the secret police knocking down your door should answer your question. Asshat.
newdealfarmgrrrlll
I don’t remember what grade I was in because I was home with some childhood bug (6-7th grade?). My folks did not approve of tv for children so we didn’t have one. Mom had me parked on the sofa while she did kitchen chores. The phone rang, and when I heard my mom gasp “Oh my God! SHOT? Do you know how badly he’s hurt?” my chest constricted in terror for I immediately assumed my beloved grandad had gotten shot while out hunting. I innocently was a bit relieved that it was only the President. It took a few days for the enormity and tragedy of the event to sink into my consciousness. It was such a big deal that my parents took us all to my grandparents to watch the funeral on tv.
Jager
I was a freshman in college, in a US history class and the prof was called out. He was gone for about 5 minutes, came back with tears in his eyes. He told what had happened and sent us on our way. The halls were filled with kids and were silent.
One of my high school buddies was in Army Medic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. He told me later that was the only time he ever went in the dayroom to watch TV. His entire company was packed in the room and it was silent as the halls at BU. He said the crusty old SFC who told his class what happened had tears in his eyes like our History prof did when he told us. I was 18 and I remember JFK as the first president who didn’t look like my grandfathers
He was an inspiration.
some guy
hey asshat, I didn’t compare the US to East Germany, someone else did, and you told us that was idiotic.
East Germany: secret police spying on citiznry. state uses torture against political enemies.
USA: secret police spying on citizenry. state uses torture against political enemies.
yup, totally night and day.
fucking idiot.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mustang Bobby: @Stella B: I was a zygote at the time of the assassination. No memories of it at all.
smintheus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): But there were several stories that captured the national attention with wall-to-wall radio broadcasts during the ’30s…kid gets trapped down a well, and such. By the time of Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, the country was accustomed to the idea of hanging onto a breaking story by huddling around the radio.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Omnes Omnibus:
It was a year later that I was at that stage. The first big news story I remember is Apollo 11.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Get off my lawn, damn kids. (Adjusts onion on my belt)
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Also have to keep in mind that Onassis was hardly a stranger, having connections to papa Joseph.
She and Jack spent many a trip with him on board his yacht when he was still a senator (and there were whispers about Ari & Jackie back then, too).
Cassidy
@some guy: There are these things, they’re called books. I’m sure more than a few have been written about the Stasi and their tactics and operations. I’d suggest you read them before you continue to make a fool of yourself.
PIGL
@some guy: and there were death squads operating in the USA, well within living memory, and it is my understanding that most were never brought to justice. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of the gunbuggering right and the antics of an increasingly paramilitary and alienated police force are no more than one single step away from El Salvador; all it would take would be a credible threat of effective popular resistance.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@smintheus:
That’s true. I’m not arguing that it isn’t. But it was easier in those cases for the correspondent to get a phone line back to the network studio, or for the studio to send out primitive remote broadcasting tech out to, say, police headquarters and beam it back to the studio (and in the case of the Hindenburg, the report that we all remember was recorded on shellac and sent back to the studio for broadcast). Pearl Harbor was so remote that much- if not most- of the early reportage was done from D.C., the reports being filtered through the White House’s and War Department’s press secretaries.
ETA: It was on and off like this all day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P-pvqHdtGU
Rhubarb
I was in 9th grade and we had been banished to the all-too-aptly-named breezeway (in late November in the Texas Panhandle) when a group of boys who had gone to eat at the bowling alley a block or so away came running back. I’ll never forget how Mike Osborne’s open jacket belled out around him as he yelled, “The President’s been shot!”
After Miss Clubb put up her knitting (bootees for Papago babies) and herded us back in, the principal came on the PA to announce the death and we were dismissed. I remember walking home and I suppose my brother (in 7th grade) was with me, but I have no recollection of him. I remember being terribly angry and of writing something about it. Then talking to a friend on the phone and distractedly watching the TV as she said, “Hey, did you see that? He just shot that guy.” Ruby and Oswald. I was terribly ashamed that it had all happened in Texas.
fleeting expletive
One detail I had forgotten about my wired remote control on my tv. I had a Palestinian friend at the time who called it a “remove control”, as English was not his first language. That amused me for a long time.
smintheus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Yes, you’re right. And my dad says that almost nobody back in the states had any idea where Pearl Harbor was, and it took quite a while for the seriousness of the attack to sink in. Didn’t help that the newspapers participated in an official coverup, downplaying the losses the fleet suffered ostensibly to avoid causing a panic.
JoyfulA
@smintheus: I lived near Schuylkill County, in Upper Dauphin County, in the 1950s!
some guy
@PIGL:
Cassidy and his conservative pals here will simply tell you this is all made up, conspiracy mongering, etc etc. nothing pisses off a conservative as much as making an analogy between the good old US of A and East Germany. it’s more than their sensitive fee fees can handle.
Suzanne
I was born in 1980 and therefore the only one of these tragedies that has much impact on my memory was 9/11. I was in kindergarten for Challenger. I am going to Dallas next month for a company event, though, and the company building is right next to the Schoolbook Depository and Dealey Plaza, so I am interested to see where it happened.
Cassidy
@PIGL: You people need to get out more.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@smintheus:
I’m not sure the press had a big say in covering anything up. First it was a clusterfuck, then the military sort of, ya know, shut the immediate area off as best as they could.
And I think that it’s quite possible that in all of the confusion, the press corps didn’t want to report rumors.
some guy
@Cassidy:
when contradicted by the facts the best response it to bang the table harder. or clap louder.
my suggestion: stop digging.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@some guy:
I think that rational people are offended by context-free, fact-free arguments, and those who employ those sorts of arguments tend to brand rational dissenters- at least in these parts of the intertrons- as conservatives.
Cassidy
@some guy: You flatter yourself too much. Not much more than annoyance really. I just think it’s kind of disgusting that anyone in this country is so entitled and ignorant as to compare what we have in this country to what the citizens of East Germany were put through. It’s teabilly level ignorance. We’re supposed to be the side that deals in facts and reality, but you are clearly the exception.
And really? Conservative? You gonna write something mean and say “nanny nanny boo boo” next? Get a grip and get a life, son.
some guy
sorry Cassidy, Center-Right blowhards like you aren’t on my side. not now, not ever.
Cassidy
@some guy: Um no. You have said nothing factual. But please, I would like for you to keep digging. You are obviously illiterate and lack any kind of awareness of history and context and I’m enjoying your display of petty narcissism and stupidity. I have to do seething during commercials. Laughing at your complete lack of education is as good as anything else.
Cassidy
@Cassidy: have to do something. Damn autocorrect.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne: Back when I worked for Satan, I used to go to Dallas quite a lot. I never got to go to the 6th floor museum until my last trip. It’s worth a visit.
some guy
@Cassidy:
too funny. watching you have the vapors I mean. I guesss it would be mean to mention which of the Gator players on ESPN2 right now are my students.
Cassidy
@some guy: Correct. I’m on the side of people who believe in rational thought and being educated. You don’t fit the criteria, son. You’re not even close. I suggest you travel more. Believe it or not, you’re suburban, first world problems are not the same as living in a police state or being in a third world country. I’ve been to more than a couple.
Gwangung
@some guy: I’d say you’re insulting my relatives.
They survived Mao and the Cultural Eecolution.
smintheus
@JoyfulA: That TV shop owner became very wealthy from the cable business. His widow, who used to live across the street from us, was so unpleasant and pretentious that all the neighbors were eager to tell us her life story. That’s how I learned about the origins of her cable empire.
Cassidy
@some guy: Now you’re just being pathetic.
“I’m a teacher for realz! I’m a real boy!”
BillinGlendaleCA
@Cassidy: Seething can work too.
some guy
@Cassidy:
I always enjoy watching you conservatives get in a snit when your shallowness gets punctured. the illiterate comment, how mean, now you have really hurt my fee fees. my dissertation director thinks I need to read more books, too. but his conservatism is a lot more nuanced than yours, and I would bet he’s a lot more cultured, but hey, if all you have is ad hominems (always a tip off of a pissed off conservative) then heck, keep digging.
Suzanne
@BillinGlendaleCA: Definitely planning on visiting it. It seems slightly morbid, but then again, I toured Dachau, so I think I can deal.
We’re just trying to pick a fancy restaurant to go to.
Gwangung
@some guy: you’re digging deeper.
Cassidy
The Coachman: Give a bad boy enough rope, and he’ll soon make a jackass of himself.
@Suzanne: Oh no. You mentioned Dachau. After some idiot looks up what it is, he’ll breathlessly tell us about that time he couldn’t find the pink Himalayan salt at Whole Foods and how it was just like the holocaust and being interrogated by the KGB all rolled together.
some guy
@Gwangung:
just curious, but what is a Cultural Eecolution? Is that like the Great Leak Forward, or more like the Hundred Flours Campaign?
JoyfulA
@smintheus: We didn’t have cable when we first got a TV, so we naturally couldn’t see much of anything. Then we learned that if we put the TV against the interior wall in the living room—the interior wall that divided our double house—we got a little better picture, apparently because our TV and the neighbor’s cable TV were about a foot apart through the wall. At which point, the neighbor threw a conniption because we were ruining her picture.
Eventually, my father gave in and subscribed to cable. He kept thinking that he should be able to get reception as well as his aunt who didn’t have cable—but she lived on the highest altitude in town and had an enormous antenna.
gian
I was born nearly a decade after. The recent stories about plots in Florida and Chicago do lend credibility to people who don’t think Oswald acted alone.
Given that JFK wasn’t the first president assassinated I do marvel at how it seems to have been such a national cultural thing. Did the nation react like this for Lincoln? When Teddy Roosevelt ascended after assassination?
Heck if I know.
James E. Powell
I’m curious about one thing and maybe it’s already been explained or maybe I’m missing something, but why is the heavy JFK assassination stuff on TV and the internet happening this weekend? The anniversary is next weekend.
Morley Bolero
@James E. Powell: 20 seconds on twitter.
hitchhiker
@James E. Powell: Sadly, I think we’re just getting started. We’ll all be sick of this conversation before it’s done.
Also — and I say this as a boomer — the boomers mostly have vivid memories of this thing, and as everyone knows we’re fond of talking about ourselves.
It really was a complete explosion of USA culture; an unthinkable thing had happened to us all. Nothing really like it until 9/11.
maxcat07
@Bob In Portland:
You and I are the same age. I have very similar memories.
James E. Powell
@hitchhiker:
I don’t know if I can stand a whole week of it. I know it is a signal moment. The era that we refer to as The 60s began on that afternoon.
But the story that’s told has gotten old. Is there really anything more to say about that day?
Omnes Omnibus
@James E. Powell: The 50 year anniversary is a big one. May as well just keep your head down for the rest of the month.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@mclaren: Last year when you said this you were a lunatic. Today you’re an annoyance. Five years from now you’ll just have been stating the simple truth.
Guess I’m a youngster here. I hadn’t been born when Kennedy was shot. Hell, I’m pretty sure my parents were still in high school.
NotMax
@JoyfulA
Had an aunt like that, but we never thought of using the much politer euphemism “antenna.”
gian
@NotMax:
There is an oblitory joke about aunts and uncles…
badjim
I was 12, and on the west coast the news came late in the morning. I was absorbed in picking out something to read when the teacher announced that the president had been shot, and missed it; a friend came up to me and said “Isn’t it terrible?” and I replied “What?” The news that he had died arrived around lunchtime.
We spent the weekend watching the funeral coverage, and for years “Hail to the Chief” would bring tears to my eyes (though that might be due in part to Herb Alpert’s “The Lonely Bull”.)
pseudonymous in nc
America: advertising heartburn and indigestion remedies (and probably constipation pills) since forever.
PurpleGirl
Late to the thread due to kitten cams…
I don’t remember much of the TV coverage because my sister was about to have her first baby and that was producing some tension at home. Everyone was more focused on the coming baby. (Years later I realized that her first daughter was not a premie, as I was told, but was a full term baby. My sister and her intended didn’t wait until the wedding…) My niece was born on Nov. 26th; my birthday was Nov. 30th.
I was 12 and in 7th grade. I first learned of the assassination while in math class. They broke into all classes on the PA system. After Kennedy died, they announced it and sent us home early.
As I said, my family was much more focused on my sister and with my father home and staying up stairs, I wasn’t keeping the TV on all day.
The one thing I do remember though is how fast it seemed wrong to play the Vaughn Meader First Family album. I really like that record and his routines. I don’t know what happened to that record. (I wonder what it would be worth today.)
mclaren
@Tehanu:
Examination of the available evidence now suggests that the 1938 “panic” supposedly caused by the Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast was greatly overblown.
Many examples exist of mass hysteria throughout American history, but they remained small and contained within a limited geographic area until the advent of the post-1960s modern media saturation. The Salem witch trials, the Mad Gasser of Mattoon (1948), the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic (1956), the June Bug Epidemic in a North Carolina textile mill (1962), all blew over fairly quickly and didn’t affect people nationwide. But starting in the 1970s America began to get national mass hysterias that lasted for years: the national “satanic panic” about alleged satanic child molestation cults that climaxed with the bizarre McMartin child molestation trial in 1988 offered the most spectacular example. But after 1988, the mass hysterias in America seem to have ramped up and spread nationwide. The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 was clearly a mass hysteria, greatly amplified by our hothouse 24/7/365 media environment. The Iraq invasion in 2003 was another remarkable instance of nationwide mass hysteria. Today’s anti-terror panic offers another superb example of nationwide mass hysteria — and, like all mass hysterias, this one is invisible to the people in its grip. Talk to people today about the weird and nonsensical procedures being put in place to allegedly defeat “domestic terrorism,” like clearing the streets of Boston and declaring effective martial life with military units patrolling the city merely become two people set off a black powder bomb in a pressure cooker, and people will vehemently defend this bizarre overreaction as “reasonable” and “necessary” just as most people reflexively rationalized the crazy invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a ‘reasonable response to 9/11’ and ‘necesssary to defeat global terrorism.’
One of the most interesting facts about these mass hysterias that periodically grip America is that people rationalize them as normal behavior while in the grip of the mass panic, then after the panic subsides, almost everyone who formerly claimed that the panic was real, immediately dismisses the entire incident and claims never to have believed it for a second. As a result, it’s almost impossible to find anyone today who claims to have believed in nationwide satanic child molestation cults — although during the 1980s, tens of thousands of law enforcement and psychiatric professionals made vast amounts of money and got huge amounts of publicity by making outlandish claims involving alleged satanic cult ritual murders of infants, candles supposedly made of wax rendered from the flesh of sacrificed children, and so on.
Likewise, today it’s very hard to find anyone who actually claims to have supported the 2003 Iraq invasion…yet polls at the time show incontrovertibly that most people did.
It’s fascinating to me to observe how completely the ordinary American revises their own memory of what they said and did only a few years ago in response to their increasingly common mass hysterias. And the highly saturated media environment seems to play a catalytic role. Interestingly, in even more media-dense countries like South Korea, the mass hysterias are even more frequent. See the article “Once again, South Koreans prove exceptionally prone to mass hysteria,” 10 June 2010. Flash riots have been known to break out in South Korea as a result of internet rumors. America isn’t there yet because our internet and other media interconnections and speeds lag far far behind those of Asian countries like Japan and South Korea (courtesy of America’s telecom/cable company internet duopolies), but at some point, we’ll catch up. You have to wonder what kind of flash riots will break out in America then, and as a result of what sort of absurd rumors.
pseudonymous in nc
That ABC clip includes Abraham Zapruder (1hr 40) in dinner jacket and bow tie, describing what he saw — he brought the film and camera into the studio — while the Dallas anchor interviewing also chain-smokes.
Glocksman
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
JFK was before my time as well.
The unexpected TV news events that stand out in my mind (in no particular order):
1. Going home for lunch in the 8th grade and seeing Reagan get shot by Hinckley.
2. Going home for lunch later that same year and seeing the Pope get shot.
3. Hearing about the Challenger explosion on the radio while on the bus to USI.
4. 9/11. Waking up and turning on the TV right after the first jet hit that morning.
The ironic thing was that I couldn’t get anyone to believe me when I told people back at school after lunch about the Pope, not even the teachers.
Nowadays I don’t think anyone would have any trouble believing it.
mclaren
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
I stand corrected. According to the intertubes, KPTV in Oregon was the first U.S. TV station to broadcast in the UHF band in 1952. That said, very few stations broadcast in UHF even in the 1960s.
It wasn’t until 1964 that the government required all new TV sets to have UHF antennas and reception built in. So in 1963 most TV sets did not have UHF antennas or UHF reception capability.
John M. Burt
@gian: The national (world) response to the assassination of President Lincoln was intense and immense. It was also, to modern sensibilities, quite morbid, sometimes bordering on the macabre. They were Victorians, they loved that kind of stuff.
One item that has really stuck in my memory is that the funeral train taking Lincoln’s body home from Washington to Illinois sometimes had to slow to a crawl because so many people had laid pennies on the track (only just now does it occur to me that this may have inspired the association of Lincoln with pennies — could be).
A French foundation took up a collection, to which no-one was allowed to contribute more than (IIRC) fifty centimes. This was used to buy a tiny heart-shaped gold charm which was given to Mrs. Lincoln, who was told that it contained “the heart of all France”.
Of course, the most beautiful and durable memorial to Lincoln from his contemporaries is surely Walt Whitman’s: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174742
pseudonymous in nc
The memorable live news events of my early childhood: the death of Pope John Paul I, the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London, the shootings of Reagan and the Pope, the assassination of Indira Gandhi. I know that Challenger as a big thing for Americans, but in the UK, the news was broken on the BBC by Newsround, which was a 10-minute broadcast on weekday afternoons designed for children.
Omnes Omnibus
@pseudonymous in nc: I think I was sleeping after a late night when the Challenger blew up. College makes things different.
alex
@hitchhiker: @hitchhiker:
Was 13 and in French I when the squawk box erupted with the radio reports from Dallas. Many of the girls started to cry, which I found strange since after all Kennedy was a public figure by choice and not a personal relation. Couldn’t understand their emotional reaction, and still don’t.
Alone in front of the TV as the news junkie in the family, saw Oswald’s murder early in the morning a few days later — and went to wake up everyone else in the house.
Linkmeister
I was thirteen, in 8th grade. I wrote up my experiences on the 40th anniversary of the murder.
handy
@Glocksman:
Not me certainly, not for this Pope.
CarolDuhart2
@gian: Yes, the nation did react that way when Lincoln was assassinated. Dunno about Garfield, but the last Presidential assassination was in 1901. So hardly anyone was alive under 80 who remembered that one. Needless to say, all of those things were considered a relic of older, more primitive days and more primitive places. Not the United States with its democracy and educated population.
I was 7, and unlike a lot of you guys with clearer memories, all I remember was the tv being on all weekend and the streets being completely empty and silent. I remember going out to play and finding no one.
What I do remember better was the aftermath-Kennedy dollars, calendars with his face on them, the commemorative magazines. His death also started a trend that continued five years later with King-streets and airports named after him, commemorative stuff all over the place.
Nancy
I remember being terribly sad, that nothing would ever be good or fun again(I was a very emotional 13 yr old) but then I saw a photo in Time magazine about some boys from Liverpool who had recently performed for the Queen Mother, there was Lennon’s quote about “just rattle your jewelry” and I thought, well, these guys look interesting, maybe the world hasn’t ended…
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@mclaren:
I think you’re pulling that, “…most TV sets did not have…,” bit out of your ass. There were roughly 15.6 million sets sold in the US before 1952, The cumulative total by the end of 1959 was roughly 67.1 million sets. That’s 7 years, with more UHF stations going to air every year for quite some years. Electronics companies made converter boxes for television sets that came without UHF built in, and there were fewer and fewer VHF-only sets produced before 1964. That’s my reasoned guess.
And that last sentence there is an example between the way I (and, I suspect, others who you consider your detractors) and you. I’m not going to put on authoritative airs and say there was no definitely no broadcasting in the UHF spectrum in 1963, or that the majority of homes in the US most definitely didn’t have the ability to receive those broadcasts before 1964, or any other fact-free, damned-fool notion of the type that you constantly spew in order to support your view of the universe.
Ramalama
@Bob In Portland: My father sometimes called one of us kids to come inside while he was plopped in front of the tv. We’d show up, breathless, “Yeah?” And then he would tell us to change the channel.
debbie
@some guy:
Your comparison is very superficial and far too facile, like taking Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin and saying they’re the same because they’re both women.
If you were actually alive at that time and saw pictures and film of people risking their lives, running through open ground, expecting the machine guns to go off at any moment, and squeezing through small openings, you’d know the false equivalence of your argument.
Ramalama
@smintheus: I hated the way the women were portrayed in this mini-series but the Winds of War was something I re-watched only recently and kind of loved still. It did a great job of showing how disconnected the world was from one another, including the Pearl Harbor attack sequences. You can see it on Netflix. Highly recommended. However, their follow-up series War and Remembrance is as awful as you can think it is for people trying to escape the reach of the Nazis. I actually wished I hadn’t seen it.
smintheus
@CarolDuhart2: There had been a bloody and highly publicized assassination attempt on President Truman in Nov. 1950. But that also shocked the nation.
smintheus
@Ramalama: Have never seen that series, though I remember when it first aired on Tv.
smintheus
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I’m pretty sure our TV when I was a little kid in the mid ’60s had no UHF. We got a new set in ’67 or ’68 and I was surprised to learn of the existence of UHF…I thought it was a new thing.
Joey Giraud
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
As an old-time TV tech, I say mcclarin is right; UHF enabled televisions were pretty rare until the 70’s.
Joey Giraud
@mclaren:
I know, ain’t it *weird* ? My best friend, a sane and stable fellow with a decent mind, cannot recall at all supporting the Iraq invasion and parroting all the mainstream BS in support of it. Claims on a stack of Bibles that he never did.
There are times I would almost prefer to “join them” and fall for the propaganda. It’s really hard seeing people you care about getting their chains yanked, their minds manipulated.
Thanks for the essays on the history of television news. I’m old enough to remember most all of what you wrote, it’s nice to see someone put the critical eye to it.
Makes it worth wading through the bickering pud-pool of cassidy and the like.
NotMax
@Joey Giraud
Difference between UHF-enabled and UHF-capable. Standalone UHF boxes were not all that uncommon in major markets (UHF was the spectrum where most non-English programming, if available, was found).
bemused senior
Had just moved to Northern Va from East Texas about 4-5 months prior to the Kennedy assasination. I was a sophomore in high school. My dad was an FDR democrat and an Air Force officer and had been an outspoken opponent of the Catholic bashing while an ROTC prof in the little town we had lived in. I was sure it would turn out to be a John Bircher who had shot JFK, and I was mortified but not surprised that the assasination had happened in Texas.
Patricia Kayden
Great thread. If Balloon Juice (I guess that would be John Cole really) ever decides to compile posts/comments into a book, this thread should be included. I learned a lot from reading everyone’s perspective/memories on this tragic event.
kathy a.
I’m trying to remember hearing about Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald — we would have been in church (on the west coast) when it happened, and I think the drill was to keep us away from the actual carnage. I remember the funeral on TV, which played all day; Caroline was a contemporary of mine, and John John so small and composed with his salute.