Customer Reviews

Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory

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There is some very significant baby in this academese- obscurantist bathwater.

Basically this is an instiutional approach to explaining why the media got it wrong. Does the author put it like this? Not exactly. The woman needs a job!

She argues that the Kennedy Assasination took place at a key time for TV news; in 1963 the networks had just switched form a 15 minute to a half-hour broadcast. The assassination, she argues, made TV news. The later you get the more reporters and editors interjected what they were doing at the time; thier identities and the legitimacy of TV journalism itself had become married to a single bullet, even though it was much more of a shotgun wedding.

Some of the narrative desriptions of individual reporters are priceless. Zelizer does a masterful job of capturing the chaos of the telphone truck, where there was only one phone. Sometimes these narratives of direct reporter experience seem to yearn for conclusions beyone those modest ones that the professor presents.

Don't be put off by the cumbersome style of this book. It is worth reading twice. It goes far toward explaining why the Corporate Media have worked so dilligently to cast Warren Commission Sceptics in such a condescending light. Just so, those aristocratic flat-earthers!

This book is simply too dangerous to be written clearly.