There's no arguing that the Kennedy assassination changed the political landscape of the United States. What I had never really considered before was how the aftermath changed the media landscape of the world.
Zapruder sold the publication rights to his film images to Life magazine, which ran the jarring, graphic still frames in its next issue a week later. The sequence was not shown as a film clip on network television until 1975. Where were the TV cameras? They were in studios. I guess most television cameras of the time were still bulky and barely mobile, the size of refrigerators. The president of the United States was not yet under constant video watch (imagine Obama ever being left alone for 2 minutes). The era of compact TV cameras and anywhere-hookups, even for professionals, was still in the future. (Hundreds of witnesses carrying video-ready smartphones? Even further into the future.)
But what was on television that November weekend was the return of Kennedy’s coffin to Washington, D.C., the funeral, the burial, and the various processions linking these events. That and, of course, the live onscreen killing of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police headquarters.
It was a harbinger of the media world to come. Transoceanic satellite links were new and expensive, but this was a story of such unexpectedness, such importance and such personal drama that TV pulled out all the stops.
The weekend’s events were watched in grief, shock and horror by millions around the world. The Kennedy assassination and funeral were a founding instance of the global village, a media experience shared in real time across borders and continents.
No comments:
Post a Comment