No, they weren’t.  In 1963, Cronkite was not yet “Uncle Walter” and the CBS publicity campaign from whence came “The Most Trusted Man in America” was almost a decade away.[i]  NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report had higher ratings than Cronkite’s evening news show and my research suggests (although it’s impossible to say definitively) that more Americans were watching NBC on the day of the assassination.  But we seldom, if ever, see clips of NBC coverage.

The iconic status of the Cronkite moment, along with images from Kennedy’s state funeral – the rambunctious riderless horse and especially little John-John saluting his father’s casket – tend to obscure how American television actually brought the assassination to the American public.  I want to suggest that the networks did a woeful job in the early hours, but that a local Dallas affiliate of third-rated ABC provided remarkable journalism that not only helped ABC scoop the more established NBC and CBS, but showed what live television news would be doing in a few years.

In those first few hours the networks’ coverage was chaotic at best, characterized by what scholar Philip Rosen terms “technological insufficiency.”[ii]  When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 PM on Friday, November 22, many network news personnel were literally out to lunch.  Scrambling to get to their studios and on air after the wire service bulletins began coming in, newsmen at all three networks in New York had to wait a good fifteen to twenty minutes for cameras to warm up.  In the mean time, bulletin cards were thrown onto the screen and network television turned into radio: a voice-based medium with no images.  All Cronkite and the other New York newsmen could do anyway was read wire service copy.

When they finally had working cameras and visual transmission, there still was nothing much for viewers to see.  There was no live feed from Dallas.  That would take some time to set up and, in CBS’s case, its mobile unit was at the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy had been scheduled to give a noon-time speech.  CBS eventually showed live footage from the aborted luncheon with guests milling about.  But no news was happening there.  NBC grappled with the headaches of trying to communicate with its Dallas correspondent, Robert MacNeil, who had telephoned in from Parkland Memorial hospital where Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally had been taken.  On air, reporters fiddled around with a telephone speaker in an excruciating attempt to allow viewers to hear MacNeil’s report.  The cumbersome technology refused to work properly.  Over at ABC, viewers watched as workmen literally built a newsroom set around the anchor as another reporter beside him stood with a phone glued to his ear trying to get updates. [iii]

Network television news, while certainly maturing as a journalistic medium – both NBC and CBS had inaugurated their nightly half-hour news shows almost three months earlier – was not ready for live, breaking, crisis coverage.  Neither the technology nor the journalistic conventions for doing this kind of television coverage had yet developed.

At WFAA-TV in Dallas, the situation was very different.  Program manager, Jay Watson, was in Dealey Plaza with another staffer to watch the Kennedy motorcade.  The studio was only a few blocks away.  The shots rang out just as they were turning from the Plaza back to work.  Watson somehow managed to zoom in on one family lying on what we now call “the grassy knoll.”  He ran to them, grabbed them, flagged down a car, and raced them all to the studio, having sent his colleague ahead to alert the newsroom.

While NBC, CBS, and ABC were showing bulletin cards and disembodied voices reading wire service copy before going back to scheduled programs and commercials, WFAA commandeered a live camera from the homemaking show that was going out live as Watson dashed into the studio.  Thus, Watson was on camera with eyewitnesses a mere fifteen minutes after the awful event.  Clearly out of breath and somewhat emotionally frazzled, Watson read the same wire service copy the Cronkite had read, but then he did what Cronkite could never do: Watson brought in his colleague and they gave their ear-witness accounts of what had occurred in Dealey Plaza.  Watson then turned to the young family seated by him – a husband and wife with their little sons on their laps.  The Newmans happened to be the best eyewitnesses Watson could possibly have grabbed.  Literally right along side Kennedy’s limousine when the fatal shot blew off the top of Kennedy’s head, they had seen it all.  Watson’s interview with the couple provided riveting television and pretty conclusive evidence within twenty-some minutes of the assassination attempt that the president was unlikely to survive such a head wound.

The scoops kept coming for WFAA.  Not long after the Newmans appeared, Abraham Zapruder happened to walk into the studio hoping the newsroom could develop his film.  Zapruder had been right behind the Newmans on the grassy knoll, balancing on a concrete abutment to capture footage of the Kennedy motorcade.  We all know what he filmed.  While the technical staff looked into developing the film, Watson decided to interview the dapper-looking Zapruder.  It’s an odd interview.  Watson almost doesn’t appear to be listening to Zapruder – he clearly doesn’t know quite who he has sitting next to him.  In fact, Watson was doing two jobs at once: functioning as impromptu anchor and interviewer, but also acting as producer coordinating the show with his director in the control booth.

Watson wasn’t the only WFAA newsman in Dealey Plaza at 12:30.  Tom Alyea, a reporter-cameraman was driving back from Fort Worth, where Kennedy and his entourage had spent the previous evening.  As he and a fellow WFAA reporter came into Dealey Plaza, they heard a report on the police radio band about gunfire at Elm and Houston.  Alyea jumped out of the car and ran to the intersection filming as he went.  Following police, he managed to dash right into the Texas School Book Depository.  Alyea was one of the only reporters to get inside the building and the only one with a camera.  The remarkably accommodating Dallas police allowed Alyea to tag along with them as they explored the building looking for the assassin.  Alyea filmed as they scoured the sixth floor, eventually finding the sniper’s nest and the carefully hidden rifle.  Trapped inside the now quarantined building, Alyea managed to toss his film out the window to another WFAAer who ran the film back to the studio where it was quickly developed and broadcast.  Neither CBS nor NBC had access to footage like this.

Yet another WFAA newsman, Ron Reiland, got inside the Texas Theater as police searched for Lee Harvey Oswald, hiding inside.  Unfortunately, in the excitement, Reiland adjusted his film camera for outside filming rather than interior filming and thus ruined what could have been spectacular footage of Oswald scuffling with police before his arrest.

ABC quickly made a decision to turn over large amounts of its network coverage to WFAA.  And while fewer viewers around the nation were watching the third network, those who were saw the future of television news.  They also got the best and most comprehensive coverage of that day’s awful events.

It’s lamentable that the story of WFAA’s coverage of the day of the assassination isn’t better known, but then again ABC didn’t have the clout of its rivals in the 1960s.  CBS seems to have made a concerted effort over the decades to brand itself and its anchor as the sole bearer of the news of Kennedy assassination to the nation.  In the recent 2013 Emmy Awards, the television industry ballyhooed its importance in 1963 with only CBS material.  In the avalanche of programming commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, PBS wraps an entire program about TV news coverage, JFK: One PM Central Standard Time, around Cronkite.  A New York Times review of the documentary notes that it “strives mightily to reinforce the perception that Walter Cronkite was the only journalist working that day.”[iv]

The most impressive TV journalists working that day were far away from Cronkite’s New York studio.  They are the largely unheralded and unknown news personnel of WFAA-TV in Dallas.

1. Warner Bros. now owns Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes, which might raise questions of bias for RT, but MPAA head Chris Dodd is more focused on Hollywood positively promoting itself, rather than individual films. This piece about Hollywood’s white people-heavy summer releases won’t help out with that, but maybe this one about Hollywood actually caring about the olds will. Other moves for Hollywood include searching Europe for remake possibilities and fighting to release more films in China. (Bonus item: Remember a few months ago when I joked about how the MPAA ratings board would explode if they had to rate A Serbian Film? From A.O. Scott’s review of the film: “A Serbian Film” is rated NC-17. The best part of this movie may be that members of the M.P.A.A. ratings board had to sit through it.”)

2. The Cannes Film Festival began Wednesday. Indiewire has a preview of what we’ll be missing, and Peter Bradshaw highlights ten notable Cannes films, including Mel Gibson’s The Beaver, which opened with a deadly thud here. Scott Roxborough says this year’s festival is about big stars and edgy auteurs, while Sharon Waxman notes that women directors are making their mark. Cannes will also feature a film by jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who will be further honored in absentia with an award for courage and independence of thought.

3. The entry on ancillary film distribution always seems to start with bad news about DVDs; so why fix what isn’t broken? DVD revenue dropped 44% last year, so far in 2011 DVD and Blu-Ray sales are off 19% from last year, and Brent Lang doubts that 28-day rental delays will boost sales. On the bright side, um…aaanyway. YouTube is moving forth with its movie rental plan, which poses a marketing challenge, while Netflix is looking to expand into Latin America.

4. Microsoft bought Skype. Some analysts believe Microsoft dramatically overpaid for this acquisition and that the company’s main goal was just to keep Skype away from Facebook. Others say Microsoft has real plans for Skype, expecting that it will boost Microsoft’s standing in the communications market, especially the mobile arena, it could tie in with Kinect, and it might be Microsoft’s gateway into the smart TV business. Or this could just end up as good news for Apple.

5. Three major music industry developments this fortnight: First, Access Industries bought Warner Music for $3.3 billion, which could also open the way for a merger with EMI, though that will be a highly competitive bidding process with regulatory issues. Second, Google has launched its cloud-based music service locker, without the support of record labels, which means it’s basically a remote hard drive for your own music, not a purchasing service, making it positive news for the future of cloud computing but keeping Google and Amazon well behind Apple. And third, dead piracy outlet LimeWire has settled with 13 music labels for $105 million in copyright damages (note: artists don’t get a cent of that), but during the trial, LimeWire’s lawyers tried to stress that label mismanagement and poor executive stewardship was ultimately at fault for the music industry’s troubles, not piracy.

6. A “Do not track” bill that allows consumers to opt out of online info tracking has been introduced in the Senate; media scholar Jeff Jarvis doesn’t think such a bill is necessary, while Google and Facebook argue that such bills can be economically threatening. Amazon is using the economic threat of sales tax imposition to cut ties with more states, and another online business regulation story to keep an eye on is the internet censorship bill. (Random extra that might make you feel old: “All your base has belonged to us” is ten years old.)

7. If you follow any British people on Twitter, you likely saw a #superinjunction tweet or two over the past few weeks. It’s part of a right juicy scandal, as only the Brits can do best, involving sex, celebrities, footballers, gossip, privacy, and gag orders, all writ even larger thanks to social media, especially Twitter, which saw its best UK day ever last week thanks to the circulation of rumors and jokes. Twitter itself is trying to stay out of it and UK gag laws might not even apply to the US company. (Hmm, I wonder if they’d apply to WAYM.)

8. Busy days for Facebook, from internal arguments over prospects in China, to more Congressional questioning over Facebook’s security and privacy issues, to consumer advocate concerns over photo-tagging of brands, to a little matter of Facebook losing face after getting caught conducting a surreptitious smear campaign against Google and trying to evade accountability for it, though some say that the point Facebook was trying to get across about Google’s privacy issues is at least a valid one (you can find an extensive discussion of those issues here).

9. A few items this fortnight showcase major challenges faced by news media outlets: Google lost a precedent-setting appeal in Brussels over links to Belgian newspapers, Facebook is closing in on Google’s news traffic driver dominance, debates about unpaid online contributors and how we judge journalistic value continue to rage, the New York Times website is at a break-even point post-paywall, and a new New Yorker iPad app may represent the beginning of the end of print. Finally, the 2011 National Magazine Award Winners have been announced, and I plan to read the winning articles online, with Instapaper allowing me to save them to read later. Sorry, paper.

10. Some good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: BBC Airs Death, Kutcher New Man, Illegal Streaming, NBC Cancellation & Pickup News, Social Media Power, Commissioner to Comcast, Daytime Emmy Noms, Fox Cancellations, Boston Cable, Vast Wasteland Revisited, Showtime Viewer Research, OWN Shake-Up, Bounce Secures Markets, Netflix & Cable, Emmys Deal, TV Households Drop, USA’s Off-Net Impact, Osama bin Laden Coverage.

*Programming note: The bad news is that this is the last WAYM post perhaps until summer’s over. The good news is that WAYM is going on hiatus so I can focus on something else: I’ll be heading across the ocean this week to teach a six-week study abroad course in London focusing on contemporary British TV. I plan to file “Report From…” Antenna posts on Sundays (as long as climate change doesn’t kill the UK’s wifi first) that cover my new experiences with watching and teaching British television. I’m also working on a new research project comparing and contrasting British and US industry practices and programming, so I hope to kick around a few preliminary ideas in these posts, and I especially hope that numerous British and Anglophile Antenna readers offer their thoughts and answers to the (occasionally dumb) questions I’ll raise. So until next Sunday, cheerio! (The British probably don’t really say that, do they, it’s probably just something I’ve seen on TV, right?)

It wasn’t the first time a comic book character’s death had been announced by mainstream (rather than specialized or pop culture-centric) news sources. When DC Comics killed off Superman in 1992, the issue, which was vacuum-sealed in an opaque plastic bag for secrecy (and collectability), made waves in the news media. Likewise, when Marvel killed off Captain America in 2007, the news spread across the internet like wildfire the morning the comic was published. And deaths aren’t the only comic book events that receive media coverage. In the past few years alone, headlines have sprung up in mainstream news venues about Archie marrying Veronica, Captain America carrying a gun, and Wonder Woman wearing pants. In each example, the news hit the wire before the issue in question was available for purchase – in the case of Johnny’s death, more than 24 hours before comics’ usual Wednesday release date, and hours before any stores would open for the early, unofficial Tuesday release of Fantastic Four #587.

The comic book industry is a small one with a tiny core audience, and it’s not shocking that companies like Marvel, DC, and Archie would harness the power of the mainstream press to try to get new bodies into the specialty shops where comics are near-exclusively sold. Fantastic Four #587, like the Death of Superman, was placed in a vacuum-sealed “polybag,” a practice reserved in the past for so-called “collectible” issues that largely went out of favor after the burst of the speculation bubble in the 1990s. The companies assume (correctly) that non-readers will hear the news and buy the issue out of an (erroneous) assumption that its “special event” quality will make it valuable years down the line, thus briefly spiking the company’s profits. And if even a handful of those potential collectors spots something on the comic book shelf that makes them come back the next week and the week after that, the corporate logic goes, so much the better.

What is more surprising, though, is the mainstream media’s treatment of these stories as legitimate, reportable news events, rather than as spoilers for serial narratives. I can’t imagine a scenario in which the Associated Press would report spoilers for a death on LOST before the episode aired, or the death of a Harry Potter character before the release of the sixth or seventh book. While rumors, advance reviews, and other easily-accessible sites for spoilers on the internet are commonplace, the mainstream news generally avoids directly reporting such information, at least until the general public has gotten the opportunity to consume the piece of media in question. But news organizations possess no such qualms about spoiling comic books.

This raises questions about the strange place that comic books occupy in the cultural landscape. The most popular comic book superheroes are some of the oldest, most iconic fictional characters in modern America, cultural strongholds from the 1930s through the present. Yet circulation of comic books themselves in the 21st century is pitifully low – a comic that sells 100,000 copies in 2011 is a blockbuster, and the average American is more familiar with the heroes through movies, cartoons, and merchandise. As a result, the news reports play to the lowest common denominator, revealing the key events in the comics without providing any context and sending the curious to comic shops to pick up an issue that will make absolutely no sense to anyone who has not been following the serialized story. A non-reader would never know that Archie’s marriage to Veronica was simply a fantasy of one possible future, that the gun-slinging Captain America was not Steve Rogers but his sidekick, former brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes, or that Johnny Storm died at the culmination of a long storyline involving alien invaders from another dimension. The only people who wouldn’t be confused by these things are the regular comic book readers – the very people who find the pervasiveness of the spoilery news stories so frustrating.

But for the news media, confusion about the narrative is not a concern, because the news media does not treat comics as narrative. Comics are periodicals, both in form (floppy, stapled pages of content and ads) and release structure (monthly or weekly), and the treatment of comic books by the media can be compared much more readily to its treatment of magazine periodicals than its treatment of television shows or book sequels. In the current digital climate, news of a celebrity having a baby or coming out of the closet hits the wire long before the physical issue of People hits the stands, no matter how allegedly exclusive the content. Comics, as conceptualized by the media, are no different – they are merely magazines reporting news from another universe, a universe full of players as beloved and well-known as Gwyneth Paltrow or Lance Bass. One needn’t be a diehard *NSync fan to be curious about Lance Bass’s sexuality, and, likewise, one needn’t be a comic book reader to care about what happens to the Human Torch.

The difference, however, is that despite the iconic status of their characters, the periodical status of their form, and the small size of their audience, comics are narratives, narratives lovingly constructed by hard-working writers and artists. In a spoilery media culture that ignores story for the sake of shallow reporting on the status of fictional people, that’s the fact that threatens to gets lost in the shuffle. Superhero comic books have long struggled for cultural legitimacy, fighting the derisive “Wham! Biff! Pow!” headlines, and as long as the American media landscape (not to mention corporate marketing departments) treats them as news delivery mechanisms rather than stories, that struggle will continue.

1. This time around, the video game anniversary of note is the Playstation, which has turned 15, and Joystiq celebrates with gifts of not just one but two infographics. This also makes it a good time to ask if classic video games still hold up. We’ll see if Madden on Facebook will hold up. I’m 100% certain The Room Tribute Flash game will; how could it not?

2. The music industry continues to struggle with sales, and while on iTunes music is still central, apps downloads may soon surpass song downloads (though The Oatmeal has a great cartoon about how we really feel when buying apps), and music labels aren’t cooperating with Ping but are cooperating with Google. Maybe Iron Maiden has the solution to the music industry’s problems.

3. Paste Magazine was among the print casualties this fortnight, and Arthur Sulzberger announced the New York Times would be one someday. Right now, newspapers are struggling to maintain their advertising share, and Gawker is beating all newspapers but the New York Times in online hits share, while Vogue is working to make both its print and online sources more advertiser friendly, and Playboy has become more blind-reader friendly.

4. It’s Hollywood summer summary time: summer was slow, attendance was down, ticket price gouging was up, there were summer trends and summer winners and losers, but Kick-Ass wasn’t the loser many first thought.

5. In indie cinema, it’s been a good year for documentaries and a good summer for women in art house seats and behind cameras, but it’s been a tough summer for specialty crossover hits and a tough everything for Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote project. What it’ll be for I’m Still Here is being hotly debated.

6. Redbox hit its one billionth DVD rental, and now it’s looking to a new horizon: streaming. Google wants to compete in that realm too, one that has helped to make Netflix’s CEO a very rich man. Blockbuster actually has an advantage over the others in being able to offering certain rentals earlier, but it might not have the money to market that fact to consumers. iTunes and video-on-demand consumers can see Freakonomics earlier than even theatergoers can, and David Ehrlich believess such a model can actually help theaters in the end.

7. Twitter now touts 145 million registered users worldwide, but still has yet to truly go mainstream. It’s increasingly a key news platform, however (the Ford Explorer verdict story is especially striking), as well as a music industry factor, and for its alchemy with Werner Herzog and Kanye West (or so we presume) alone, we have to be grateful it exists.

8. Jaron Lanier doesn’t like social media forms; Pepsi loves them. Jim Louderback doesn’t like viral videos; Arcade Fire loves them. Nicholas Carr doesn’t like hyperlinks; Scott Rosenberg loves them.

9. The new Digg got criticized by old users and pwned by Reddit users, part of a larger trajectory of decline for Digg, which has responded to its latest problems by firing an engineer and asking users to chill out, while Reddit has responded by preparing for expansion. No matter who claims supremacy, it’s tougher than you might think to measure online traffic. YouTube Instant certainly got a lot of traffic, so much that YouTube’s CEO offered its undergrad student creator a job. Maybe he could help YouTube finally turn a profit.

10. Some good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: Bordwell Says Don’t Bother, Univision Wins 18-49, Please Don’t Call It a Recap, State of Network News, Ramadan TV, Too Much TV?, Smaller Channel Squeeze, Comcast Charity, Done Deal, Apple & Amazon News, TV the New Cinema?, Emmy Coverage.



Obviously the terrible shape of the economy is on almost everyone’s mind. And it should come as no surprise that anger about our current condition would find its way to the ballot box. The political right has exploited that anger because, well, it makes for good politics (they have little else to sell) and attacking Obama also makes for profitable media. The political left, on the other hand, calls this “Obama’s inheritance”—that these are conditions that Obama did not create but inherited from eight years of Republican corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence (as the most recent conversation between Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank demonstrates).

The left, of course, has a point. The polity’s mood is directly related to the fact that Americans are notoriously ahistorical, not to mention ill-informed and contemptuous of politics. Given current conditions, it is simply easy to blame Obama and the Democrats for not turning things around more quickly—never mind that guy who was in charge 365 days ago.

What interests me more is what we see in the middle. What has grabbed my attention is how presentist our media is in their reporting. By presentist I mean the way in which news media are generally focused on explaining the now with little regard to what happened last month or last year (although I do enjoy the double entendre of the dictionary definition of presentist–“a person who maintains that the prophecies in the Apocalypse are now being fulfilled”). Even NPR is breathless in its “reporting” on how the public feels right this minute and connecting those feelings to Obama, with little attempt to frame its stories in the broader context of the slow processes of governance and economic change.

Political scientists say that the modern presidency is dominated by the “continuous campaign,” whereby campaigning for public office continues every day that one is in office. They bemoan the fact that the dynamics of campaigning destroys one’s ability to engage in the politics of governance. What political scientists often fail to recognize is the continuous campaign’s connection to our entertainment culture, and celebrity politics in particular.

Celebrity politics isn’t just about the selling of politicians such as Obama and Palin on the campaign trail (and the public’s affective relationship therewith). It is also the way in which news media treat governance in the same fashion that they treat celebrity culture. Who is up or down on any given day, as determined by the gods of popularity? Is the celebrity being worshiped or vilified by the public right now? News media, like celebrity itself, must sell its meaningfulness or relevance to the public every day, and aligning with popular sentiment becomes the basis for how reporting gets done. Looking backwards is only helpful in end-of-year specials. And describing the intricacies of how power works simply doesn’t sell like the red carpet spectacles featured in OK! magazine.

If the public is ahistorical and the press is damningly superficial in its role in framing or reporting reality (much less helping the public understand governance), then Obama best return to campaign mode soon, for the road ahead looks to be a particularly bumpy ride.