When the News Went Live

On this day 47 years ago, one of the defining moments in American history took place. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Not only did it change history forever, but it brought changes to the world of journalism as well.

Credit to PBS.org for this look into how November 22, 1963 brought television journalism into the picture.


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/oswald/press/

How did Americans learn of the assassination on November 22, 1963?

You have to remember that there were very few TV stations, and people had not yet had the kind of event that would cause them to corral around the TV. This was the very first time that TV brought the public together. The first relays of what had happened went out on radio, by the way.

Television did what was unthinkable back then -- it stopped all broadcasting and all commercials. It stayed with the story for four days. It did everything it could to provide people with ongoing information. From Friday to Monday it provided the American public with an ongoing visual screen of what was going on in the assassination story.

I think that today when crises happen we go immediately to the TV. People don't even think twice. When 9/11 happened people turned on the TV set, even in schools.

In the Sixties that was not the case. TV news was hardly coming of age at that time. We only had 15-minute newscasts. It was very elementary. This was a really new experience.

How did the media cover the assassination?

This was really the event that TV news journalists like to claim brought them to age. In 1963 TV journalists were seen as the fluff journalists. Print journalists were the serious journalists. When the Kennedy assassination occurred, of course, TV cameras were able to roll 24/7, and so what you got was an ongoing attentiveness to the event that print could not provide. We got ongoing continuous coverage of the story.






In a day of journalism firsts, another first took place just two days later. Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK's apparent assassin, was himself shot to death two days later in the first live murder ever witnessed on television.