“President Kennedy has been shot.” – Walter Cronkite, November 22, 1963
Today marks the 47th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.
Viewing the CBS television network’s coverage of the event, I am left with several impressions:
* The announcement of what was at the time understood only as an assassination attempt–“President Kennedy has been shot“–was issued by the familiar voice of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. There was no video of him speaking during these early updates because the cameras in the network’s newsroom were not on and needed nearly a half-hour to become operable.
* The shocking nature of the news that the President had been shot and the starkly clear detail in which Cronkite conveys it is set in almost surreal contrast to the mundane superficiality of the soap opera “As The World Turns” and the advertisements that clumsily follow it. In part two of the over 11-and-a-half hours of video coverage of the event found here, Cronkite concludes one of his updates and the next thing the viewer is presented with is a commercial for Friskies Puppy Food (about 6:30 mark), complete with what is ostensibly a mother dog and several of her adorable little ones.
* The name of young Texas newsman Dan Rather receives its first mention at about the 6:00 mark in this video, after he reported several minutes prior to official confirmation that President Kennedy had died. Cronkite’s iconic announcement of the official confirmation comes at about 5:50 of this video. He proceeds to contrast the warm welcome Kennedy had received after arriving in Texas with how Adlai Stevenson, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was treated when he came to Dallas less than a month earlier. With noticeable disdain, Cronkite explains that Stevenson was greeted with protesters carrying signs stating, “Get out of the UN” and “Coexistence is appeasement” and that one of the signs struck him on the head. The New York Times noted that Stevenson had also been struck by a protester’s spit.
* Technically, broadcast news in 1963 was obviously miles behind today’s collection of network and cable news outlets. It’s striking how there is no video of the event throughout all of this coverage. But after viewing much of CBS’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination as well as NBC’s coverage, video of the breaking news (though described by the breathless reporter as happening “10 or 15 minutes ago”) from a local Dallas television station, and reading this thorough and compelling recap of the broadcast television aspects of the assassination from the Museum of Broadcast Communication, I cannot say that our modern technical superiority provides us with an advantage of insight over the television news audience of nearly a half-century ago. We definitely receive news faster today, but this speed has not necessarily brought greater accuracy or detail. Watch Cronkite in these videos, think about today’s anchors and the style of news presentation, and judge for yourself.
