Assassination, National Trauma, and Television: Historicizing the Death of JFK through a Media Studies Lens

Over the four-day “Black Weekend” from 11/22/63 when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, to his state funeral on November 25^th, 96% of the U.S. population watched on average eight hours of continuous, commercial-free television coverage of the traumatic events (Greenberg and Parker, 1965).  Fifty years later, the assassination is still alive in Americans’ memory – witness the huge amount of commemorative attention the half-century anniversary garnered with television specials, magazines, newspaper articles, a few serious books (Sabato, 2013) and a plethora of popular works.

That the assassination is one of the momentous events of the 20^th century is generally accepted, but historians have not accorded it the kind of scholarly attention given other aspects of JFK’s presidency. Much of the literature on the assassination tends to focus on never-ending conspiracy debates. Following the AHA conference theme, I argue that media scholars bring a particularly useful set of tools and disciplinary approaches in examining the assassination as a crucial moment in postwar American history because the event was experienced by Americans fundamentally as a “media event” (Dayan and Katz, 1992).  In essence, my question is: what does a history of the JFK assassination look like if we put television at the center?

My research is grounded in two-dozen interviews with news personnel at NBC and ABC by Columbia University sociologists conducted a few weeks following the assassination and archived at the JFK Library. I also use a cache of audience letters written to the anchors of NBC responding to the coverage (JFKL and State Historical Society of Wisconsin).  I also do textual analysis of the television coverage.  Reconstructing those four days as mediated by television, I challenge historians to think seriously about the place of this medium in postwar American history.