The birth - and maturity - of saturation news coverage
On Sunday morning, Nov. 24, 1963, at 11:20, television showed the first live, on-air murder. While a horrified press corps looked on, Lee Harvey Oswald, the prime suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, was shot dead. People already numb from one death suddenly had another playing out in their living rooms. They wondered: Had the country gone mad?
In that moment, a medium flexing its news- coverage muscles discovered that its very presence could raise troubling issues - issues that are still with us today.
To that point, in covering the Kennedy assassination, TV news had proven to be a force - at times surprising viewers with power, depth, and sensitivity. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, for example, was visibly choked up confirming the president's death. Perhaps the most striking part for many at home, though, was that television could effectively take them directly into the heart of the unfolding, real-life drama. First, in Dallas. Then, in Washington.
This was an era of only three major networks, when local stations signed off overnight. No cable. No satellite. In fact, the networks had just expanded the evening news from 15 minutes to 30, at the same time adding more opportunities for live location coverage. Until then, most location stories of the time were usually scheduled events such as space launches or political conventions or documentaries. Adding more of such material to the nightly news had demonstrated TV's desire to grow over time. But it was a dramatic and symbolic coming of age for live TV news to replace all commercial programming for several consecutive days.
There were countless network reports and, like today's C-SPAN, great stretches of time devoted to official events unfolding at their own deliberate pace. Television showed every possible moment it could capture. This total immersion covering a national tragedy was widely embraced and praised as TV news at its best.
The next step, though, came almost immediately. If television won kudos for showing every available moment, then it seemed to instinctively follow that every moment should therefore be available to be shown on camera - as part of serving the public. Armed with this access, television could do more than merely talk about the news. Television could literally bring those images home.
In part to accommodate this desire by TV (and the press in general) to follow every moment of the weekend of the assassination, funeral, and burial of Kennedy, the transfer of Oswald betweeen jails was done in full public view rather than as a quiet, high-security, behind-the-scenes action. The press could see it. So could any member of the general public in the area, including Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby.
To be sure, TV and the rest of the press corps did not pull the trigger. Ruby certainly didn't shoot Oswald just to get on television. Yet with its hunger for pictures to accompany the story, television helped to set the stage for a shocking turn of events. This was a sobering warning that when TV news entered the scene, it was more than as just another reporter.
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