Sixty Years Ago

[LanceyHoward]

If something like that happens again, I will find a CBS radio affiliate airing the network's wall-to-to wall coverage for reasons you have stated. IMHO, there still exist some very good network broadcast journalists regulated to the "basement" of radio.

Is there still a "basement" of radio left? I know the hourly network news broadcasts stopped a long time ago. Does CBS, or any other network, produce radio reports for its affiliates? For example, in Denver, KOA has a morning news block but I think they only have one street reporter. And that guy may be the only radio reporter in the city.

60 years ago the leading radio stations were generally co-owned by the television stations and shared newsrooms. But those duopolies were banned by the FCC in the 70's Then in the early 80's the FCC did away with the requirement that a radio station had to program some news. As stations were sold the radio and television stations were separated and the radio newsrooms discontinued.

 

[Driftwood]

My mom was three days removed from her 18th birthday. She is currently three days removed from her 78th, and has been binge watching JFK stuff for a month.
My dad was in the Army in Germany. He said they'd just come in off duty. He collapsed on his bed. A horn sounded, and an announcement came across "The President has been killed. We are headed to the East German border."

 

[Liut]

Is there still a "basement" of radio left? I know the hourly network news broadcasts stopped a long time ago. Does CBS, or any other network, produce radio reports for its affiliates? For example, in Denver, KOA has a morning news block but I think they only have one street reporter. And that guy may be the only radio reporter in the city.

1. Yes.
2. CBS radio still airs hourly news broadcasts. It also provides long-form programming for affiliates, as well as packaged reports to major market stations. As for others, Fox radio does hourlies. As far as I know, ABC radio still does top-of-the-hour reports but haven't stumble onto one of late.

 

[Liut]

After thinking about it more, let me just add a little bit to my original response to maumann:
I'd probably be checking out NPR, as well.
In addition, in the likely event that CBS radio turned things over to the television side, I'd hang with them. For how long, don't know. I respect Norah O'Donnell, big fan of Major Garrett, to a lesser extent ditto John Dickerson, ditto Jeff Pegues. But it would probably try to get Gayle King involved. She has a hard time reading the teleprompter on any given day. Cannot imagine her being able to handle all the ad-libbing that would be involved.
I was on the air the morning of 9-11 at an ABC affiliate. ABC radio's New York news department did an outstanding job in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Later, they turned it over to Peter Jennings and that was fine. He was also outstanding but ... as I think maumann would agree, Jennings and his contemporaries were of a different era ... and breed.
EDIT: Neglected to mention Margaret Brennan.

 

[SFIND]

Well, I'll be one of the contrarians apparently and I'll go my grave believing there was a conspiracy, and Oswald was certainly not acting on his own. I can see his patsy statement as believable, or at the very least, can buy Starman's comment that the machinery was put in place to allow this to happen by higher powers.

Has it been proved? I guess that would be a negative. But just way too many strange occurrences to allow me to come to the conclusion a guy who was allowed to flit back and forth to Russia during the height of the Cold War pulled the trigger on his own (from a window I believe that wasn't even the best shot/sightline to complete the kill on the 6th floor) and then he conveniently gets snuffed out two days later by a guy with mob ties who is allowed access to walk right in and take him out.

Not to mention the inconsistencies in the doctors reports from Parkland vs Bethesda, the frickin' magic bullet, a lot of people related to the event dying unusual and early demises, et cetera et cetera.

I've seen both of the documentaries mentioned above, and as assuring as they are in stating there is no conspiracy, there are a number of good books (High Treason by Groden and Livingstone, Crossfire by Marrs to name a couple) that at the very least should leave one very uneasy accepting the solo Oswald theory as fact.

You can go ahead and fit me for my tinfoil hat--I'm comfortable in how I feel about this event and what I believe really happened.

Enjoy your tinfoil hat.

The single bullet is fact, computer models have proven it. No magic involved. (Another horrible legacy of Stone's film; Jennings' doc destroys how he presented it.)

The "inconsistencies" between Parkland and Bethesda were debunked by NOVA, which filmed Parkland docs confirming the autopsy photos match their memories of treating Kennedy.

Plenty of testimony and documentary evidence re: Oswald "flittering back and forth" exisists from Soviets (both from his time in USSR, and in Mexico in '63) and the Cubans (from embassy visit in Mexico). Plenty of other US citizens went to/defected to USSR during Cold War.

Ruby was friends with Dallas cops. Took care of them at his clubs. He was at the police station not infrequently. He was a low-level, boisterous, temperamental mobster who would have been a horrible pick for such a job.

Gerald Posner's book Case Closed tears apart much of what others (like the two books you mentioned) have suggested.

 

[HanSenSE]

I remember during 1/6, ran out to my car during my meal break for an update and KCBS had tapped into the broadcasts of the CBS Radio affiliate in Washington. Thought of that during the early moments of the Niagara Falls crash when CNN was interviewing all the regular suspects on a possible terrorist angle. And I kept thinking. "I want information, not speculation. Can't they go to the local affiliates?"

 

[SFIND]

FRONTLINE AND NBC ARE IN ON IT!

People can believe what they want.

If you want to shirt on the work of well-regarded investigative journalists and shirt on what actual evidence shows, be my guest.

 

[qtlaw]

Enjoy your tinfoil hat.

The single bullet is fact, computer models have proven it. No magic involved. (Another horrible legacy of Stone's film; Jennings' doc destroys how he presented it.)

The "inconsistencies" between Parkland and Bethesda were debunked by NOVA, which filmed Parkland docs confirming the autopsy photos match their memories of treating Kennedy.

Plenty of testimony and documentary evidence re: Oswald "flittering back and forth" exisists from Soviets (both from his time in USSR, and in Mexico in '63) and the Cubans (from embassy visit in Mexico). Plenty of other US citizens went to/defected to USSR during Cold War.

Ruby was friends with Dallas cops. Took care of them at his clubs. He was at the police station not infrequently. He was a low-level, boisterous, temperamental mobster who would have been a horrible pick for such a job.

Gerald Posner's book Case Closed tears apart much of what others (like the two books you mentioned) have suggested.

The conspiracy believers defy explanation because if they applied their think of a "possible conspiracy" to their day to day life they would not get anything done and would not be vaccinated and protected against every known virus to mankind.

They think that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, simply having a contrary "feeling" or "thought" is enough to cancel out the overwhelming evidence.

Well let's apply that to the food they eat, the cars they drive, the medicine they ingest, the surgical procedures that they are subjected to. That is all based on scientific analysis and testing, relying on the known and rejecting the "unknown" or "unproven".

 

[Liut]

I remember during 1/6, ran out to my car during my meal break for an update and KCBS had tapped into the broadcasts oh the CBS Radio affiliate in Washington. Thought of that during the early moments of the Niagara Falls crash when CNN was interviewing all the regular suspects on a possible terrorist angle. And I kept thinking. "I want information, not speculation. Can't they go to the local affiliates?"

At least get someone from their Buffalo affiliate on-air before a CNN crew arrives. Someone can correct me (maybe things of changed) but when I was in television, we were a CBS affiliate with some sort of cross-affiliation with CNN. But that was a long time ago.
But to your first point, it's so frustrating to watch a group of talking heads on a set with additionals sitting in their house just blabbering on and on when they hardly know any facts yet.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

Amazing how Walter Cronkite was able to ad-lib so deftly, with only scraps of information available being handed to him from every direction at once, some correct, others not so. There's no one I can think of who could hold that kind of composure under stressful conditions like that now without resorting to opinions and heresay.

And the fact that he felt like he needed to remove his glasses to talk to the camera was fascinating as well. He also chokes up just after reading the official announcement.

He was one of a kind.

In Cronkite's autobiography, he said that when he got off the air, he went to his office to decompress. He said a phone rang outside his office, and, with no secretary around, he picked the phone up himself. He said a woman called and said to tell that Walter Cronkite that she thought it was terrible that he choked up on the air.

Cronkite then identified himself to the woman, called her an idiot and hung up.

 

[maumann]

In Cronkite's autobiography, he said that when he got off the air, he went to his office to decompress. He said a phone rang outside his office, and, with no secretary around, he picked the phone up himself. He said a woman called and said to tell that Walter Cronkite that she thought it was terrible that he choked up on the air.

Cronkite then identified himself to the woman, called her an idiot and hung up.

Reminded me of the way Jim McKay said, "They're all gone" when word of the firefight at the Munich Airport reached him during the Israeli athlete massacre in 1972.

 

[Liut]

In Cronkite's autobiography, he said that when he got off the air, he went to his office to decompress. He said a phone rang outside his office, and, with no secretary around, he picked the phone up himself. He said a woman called and said to tell that Walter Cronkite that she thought it was terrible that he choked up on the air.

Cronkite then identified himself to the woman, called her an idiot and hung up.

Awesome pull. In Gary Paul Gates' excellent history of CBS News through the late 1970s, he wrote Cronkite slammed the phone down so hard that Uncle Walter initially thought he had broken it.