JFK: In a Twitter-less World, Kennedy Slaying Was a Media Event

    In today's busy-body world of social media, news travels very fast but in 1963 it likely took a little longer for people to discover the President had been shot and killed in Dallas. Not that much longer though as the media of the day worked very hard with the technology available.

     Such an event was clearly a "FLASH" on the AP and UPI teletypes clanging away in newsrooms. The rarely used designation was the highest category of news sparking an ear-catching ten-bell serenade from the wire machine. Reporters today have never seen a teletype or stood there reviewing the miles of paper it produced.
    In fact the newsrooms of today are quiet like a library with the subdued lighting of an opium den. Gone are the crusty editors barking out orders or the frenzy of operating at Twitter-like speed in a non-digital age.
    In newspapers it literally was "stop the presses" as the media sought to turn on a dime and get the information out quickly through the means used at the time.
    Television came of age during the assassination and for days print blanketed the story.

Camelot's End Just Moments Away

 

    I was attending Brookview Elementary School in Irondequoit NY that day but unlike many schools, we were not told what had happened. It wasn't long before we were home and watched it all play out on television including the spectacle of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV.
    Yet there was no video of the shooting of the President except for the Zapruder film that surfaced later.   Imagine the excruciating detail we would see today.
     A lot of water under the bridge in the fifty hears since but the enormity of the event can be seen in that everyone....I mean everyone who was of age....remembers where they were that day.
Rieder: If JFK had been shot in the social media era