John Ziegler:
As both a career-long critic of the modern news media and as a life-long student of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I was fascinated to recently pick up a full copy of the The Dallas Morning News from November 23, 1963 (it was part of a promotion for one of the many movies being released to mark the 50th anniversary). This facsimile of the local paper of record for the biggest single news event of the 20th century, on the day after it occurred, tells us an extraordinary amount about what really happened in Dallas and just how much the news media (and our culture) has changed in the half century since.
The first thing I noticed is the staggering volume of local coverage. It was simply stunning, especially given the incredible time and technological restrictions which the paper was facing when the world suddenly changed with three cracks of an assassin’s rifle. In both quantity and quality the coverage put the far-more technologically advanced modern media to shame in many important ways.
The assassination occurred at 12:30 pm (though the paper reported it happened at 12:20 pm) on a Friday afternoon and yet the Saturday edition of the paper somehow how featured, by my count, at least 56 separate news items related to the event which originated locally. This was on top of dozens more which were taken from various international news wire services (which were also extremely impressive, especially when it came to somehow extensively documenting Oswald’s time in Russia nearly instantly).
I doubt that there is a traditional news paper today, even with all of our Internet and Smartphone-based advances, which would be capable of putting out 56 local stories on one subject in far less than 24 hours (especially when also having to dramatically alter almost all of the paper’s advertising in the same short time frame). If they were able to somehow pull that off, I seriously doubt their accuracy would be able to stand the test of time and scrutiny nearly as well as that first edition of the The Dallas Morning News.
As someone who has studied the Kennedy assassination as closely as anyone who hasn’t been paid to do so (and who evolved from believing in a conspiracy as a young man to finally concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald effectively acted alone), I was almost literally shocked at just how accurate the initial reporting was. They not only got very little wrong, but, just as amazingly, they got almost everything exactly right.
Even when they engaged in wild and (then) unsubstantiated, non-Google supported speculation about Oswald having recently failed in an attempt of the life of a local General, they turned out to be absolutely correct. As I was turning the pages, I half expected to see an article about how Jack Ruby was already stalking Oswald and planning to take him out.
Considering how bad the preliminary reporting has been for recent breaking news events in the Cable News/Internet era, I found it utterly remarkable that I could find only two clear and significant errors in the newspaper.
First, Oswald’s gun (a Mannlicher-Carcano from Italy) was misidentified as a German “Mauser,” though one account did accurately indicate that the rifle was “Italian.” The other error was that it was reported that Kennedy had two bullets wounds; one in the throat (which was an opening possibly too small to have come from a bullet, especially an exit wound, and which I suspect came from a bone fragment from the first bullet striking his back) and, of course, his head. We now know that he also had a back wound which apparently stopped after only a couple of inches (which I believe is where the first shot struck Kennedy before falling out on a stretcher and being later misidentified as the “Magic Bullet”).
Conversely, most of the voluminous pages from that first day read like a far more accurate accounting of the event than anything we are likely to see with the flood of provocative (and sometimes flat-out wacky) television products being shown in conjunction with the 50th anniversary. At least in this particular case, it is very clear that, when it comes to aging, news is much more like baked bread than fine wine.
Bob Shieffer was a young print reporter in Texas that day.
He came into the office after a full night shift simply to field phone calls.
He took a call that turned out to be from Oswald’s mom.
She needed a ride into Dallas.
He took her.
He ended up interviewing her for the entire trip.
Interesting how concerned she was with MONEY.
Jim Lehrer was also a print reporter in Texas then.
He went over to the police department where Oswald was being held.
He was concerned the police were ”roughing Oswald up.”
He got there was Oswald was being moved and they came toward one another in a corridor.
He asked Oswald, did you kill the president?
Owald answered, “I didn’t kill anybody.”
The notebook with this note in it went missing.
Dorothy Killgallen was a reporter there, too.
She got a sitdown with Oswald in his cell.
She told a friend she had the scoop of a lifetime.
But she was dead before she could break it.
No notes have been found.
“What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”
JFK
@This one: this one, you’re not clear on your comment. Is that supposed to be quoted from JFK? But I can assure you that the word ‘liberal’ as applied to politicians today is not something you would be proud to be. It basically applies to being liberal with working peoples money being distributed to non-working people.
In response to the post by Ziegler,
I would suggest that all he has studied is Bill O’Reilly’s book on the assassination. Anyone that has spent much time at all studying the facts of the assassination could not possible believe that LH Oswald was the shooter. I’m not going to argue points because I have been doing that for 50 years. The vast majority of people that have studied the details can only reach one conclusion and it doesn’t involve Oswald being the assassin. All of the known details of the shooting have to be completely ignored, such as
The gun that was recovered and identified as a German Mauser was, in fact, a German Mauser. There was no ‘mis-identification’. The gun that was identified as the Carcano and was shown that day was not the Carcano that A Hidell had ordered. I’m not going to argue those points, they are a given and those that don’t believe it are so un-informed or deliberately misleading that they are not worth discussing it with. I can understand why the libs and Dims don’t want the truth to be accepted, that they were involved in and covered up actions in eliminating a President of their own party.