Why did TV take so little notice of JFK anniversary?
Did anyone notice how little TV coverage there was Saturday of the anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy? It made me wonder if collectively my baby boomer generating is forgetting the event we vowed never to forget. Or, if there was some other cultural factor at play.
I could find hardly any coverage of the event on television during the day. In the evening, I turned to C-SPAN confident I would find it there in prime time. If not C-SPAN I, I was certain C-SPAN II would be doing books about Kennedy -- even if it only amounted to reruns of prior interviews with authors of the hundreds of Kennedy books.
But the only sustenance I found was on C-SPAN radio. God bless its oral history on Saturday afternoons -- the source of one of my deepest pleasures. The radio channel had interviews taped earlier with the first emergency room doctor to treat Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas on the awful afternoon in 1963 -- and then a conversation with the deputy press secretary who announced the president's death.
The lack of shared memory on TV was especially troubling in week when the newly-renovated National Museum of American History re-opened -- and, as a result, the Washington media was full of talk of remembering our past.
Are we forgetting this horrible and defining moment of our past unconsciously? Or, with a new and young president-elect who reminds many of JFK, did the media consciously downplay the anniversary?
Comments
I think that most likely the media "conscioiusly downplayed" the anniversary. Americans are overwhelmed by the current realities of the economy, the ongoing war, healthcare. Moreover the holiday season is upon us, yet many commercial businesses have had to downsize partially due to low consumer purchasing. Overall its not looking too good right now...It may be a stretch, but perhaps our media is collectively trying to refocus on more optimistic issues that are invoked immediately with the new Obama administration. Displaying the state of the nation on the television screen in a more upbeat way by showing Obama and simultaneously referring less to a tragedy paints a more positive picture of the U.S. Why would the media choose to do this? Perhaps in view of the record ratings of Obama on Sixty Minutes as well as other t.v. appearances proves the idea that they will gain more of an audience by deliberatly selecting certain images and disregarding others.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 23, 2008 11:05 PM