CJR AT THE MOVIES
Dallas, November 1963
The Enduring Power of the Pictures
|
JFK: Breaking the News |
For the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, PBS has scheduled a fascinating new documentary that retraces television's local reporting of that horrific event. JFK: Breaking the News, is narrated by NBC News's Jane Pauley, who turns to PBS to do serious work. The retrospective brings back the articulate local reporters of forty years ago to tell their tales and relive those unforgettable moments in Dallas. Amazingly, the now familiar close-up images of those distant events — the handsome, vital young president and his beautiful First Lady waving from their open-air limousine; the haunting assassination scenes; the hasty swearing in of Lyndon Johnson with Jackie Kennedy in her blood-stained pink suit standing at his side; the on-screen killing of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of police headquarters; the ceremonial lying-in-state of the president, and his impressive state funeral — evoke memories and emotions almost as intense as those we experienced four decades ago.
The underlying thesis of the hourlong documentary, co-produced by the Dallas PBS station KERA and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, is that the Kennedy assassination created "a sea change in where America would turn in times of crisis." Presumably, the assassination caused the nation to turn from getting its news from newspapers to getting its news primarily from television. "From then on," concludes CBS News's Bob Schieffer, who at the time was a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "television became the dominant medium."
The problem with this view of media history is that by November 22, 1963, television had already become the nation's dominant news medium. The sea change had already taken place. Television news had already come of age. In 1960, the nation saw the first-ever televised presidential debates, which more than anything else probably contributed to Kennedy's victory over Richard Nixon. In 1962, television brought the nation the deadly riots protesting the admission to the University of Mississippi of its first black student, James H. Meredith, which triggered a decade of civil rights conflicts. In June 1963, Medgar Evers was shot in Mississippi, sparking race riots seen nationwide on television. In August, Martin Luther King's dream for racial harmony at the giant civil rights protest march in Washington, D.C., seen live on television, captured the attention of the entire nation. And in September 1963, two months before the Kennedy assassination, television's coverage of the tragedy of four children killed in the Birmingham church bombing shocked the world. That September, NBC News had cleared out the network's entire prime-time schedule for a three-hour study of civil rights, "The American Revolution of '63," a public-service initiative that would be unthinkable in today's single-minded, bottom-line television environment.
Newspapers felt the need to restructure in order to survive what
had clearly become the era of television. As my friend Richard
C. Wald, now the venerable Fred W. Friendly Professor of Journalism
at Columbia, then the raffish young national editor of the New
York Herald Tribune, said, "Because of television's explosive
growth, back then we were busy trying to change how our paper
dealt with the news to make it more interesting and useful, moving
into 'lifestyle coverage' and 'new journalism,' turning our newspaper
into a daily news magazine, operating on the assumption that our
readers had already gotten the headlines and sports scores from
the tube the night before."
Despite its off-base interpretation of media history, JFK: Breaking
the News makes for exceptional viewing. The reminiscences of the
local newsmen who covered the story in Dallas are filled with
sharp details. The program's camera images bring back the events
as if they had just happened. Again, we experience the shock of
watching the ultimate in reality television, the vivid live close-up
of the nightclub owner Jack Ruby, revolver in hand, shooting Oswald
in the crowded basement of Dallas police headquarters, while a
stunned Tom Pettit of NBC News shouts, "He's been shot! He's
been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot!"
The program also gives rise to a few surprising if trivial impressions — glimpses of the remarkably youthful Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Robert MacNeil, and Bob Schieffer in Dallas to cover the story; the sight of so many local TV newsmen casually smoking cigarettes on the set while reading news bulletins and interviewing participants, and the Ben Hecht, Hollywood-style press conference scene of the Dallas police chief emerging from his office to announce portentously, "Harvey Oswald expired at 1:07 p.m.," immediately followed by a reporter's clarifying question cutting through the bedlam, "He died?"
JFK: Breaking the News recaptures the reporting of those wrenching
moments, when, as happened thirty-eight years later during the
tragedy of 9/11, television's nonstop coverage made a community
of a diverse, stunned nation.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
