Giving Readers The Big Picture In New Ways

June 08, 1997|By Patrick T. Reardon, Tribune Staff Writer.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy, a turning point in American history, was no less a watershed for the nation's journalism. On Nov. 22, 1963, Americans learned from radio and television that their youthful president had been shot while riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas. Over the next half-hour, they turned to radio and television to learn the latest and, in the end, to hear the shattering report of Kennedy's death.

It was a moment of anguish, shock and grief, shared as an unprecedented common experience by nearly 200 million people in this country and millions more around the world. And it was only the start.

For the next three days, through television, Americans were participants in and witnesses to a deepening tragedy that included the widow's arrival in Washington with her husband's body, the slaying on live TV of the suspected assassin and that excruciatingly sorrowful funeral where the childish salute of a young boy in knee pants broke the nation's heart.

And, during it all, newspapers played catchup.

True, Chicagoans stood in line that first afternoon to grab newspapers just off the presses. They also treasured those papers as tangible reminders of their involvement in the national trauma-storing them away when it was all done in drawers with family heirlooms.

But the news in those papers was old, having been broadcast-often many times-on radio and television hours earlier.

Something had changed radically, and newspapers didn't know how to respond. The next morning, more than half a day after the killing, the headline in the Tribune was still an announcement of the previous day's event: "ASSASSIN KILLS KENNEDY/LYNDON JOHNSON SWORN IN."

Yet, the innate but previously little-tapped power of television to bring viewers into an unfolding story-so that they felt in a very real way a part of that story-had been discovered. And the genie would never go back in the bottle.

Within the year, network newscasts, previously only 15 minutes in length, had been expanded to a half-hour. From then on, television, with its riveting images and its ability to provide its audience with instantaneous access to events, was the nation's town crier, the medium to which Americans turned for the latest news on the most important events of the day.

For the Tribune and other newspapers, it was a time of soul-searching and ultimately redefinition. But it wasn't the first time such a challenge had been faced-and it wouldn't be the last.

"Any time you have a new medium come on the scene, the other media shift to accommodate it," noted Lee Wilkins, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Initially, newspapers had to compete only with each other, although given the proliferation of publications in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, it was some battle. In that battle, the primary goal was to be first to break the news-to scoop the competition.

On the morning of June 9, 1919, Chicago readers were greeted by the huge eight-column headline "TRIBUNE HAS TREATY" with a smaller subhead "Peace Terms Brought to U.S. by Frazier Hunt."

Hunt was the newspaper's war correspondent who had just arrived in Washington from Paris with a copy of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. Even now, nearly eight decades later, you can almost hear Hunt and his editors crow as you read the opening sentence of his report:

"While the senate is fuming at its inability to get a copy of the treaty of peace with the central powers, and the whole country is amazed at the refusal of the administration to unlock its vaults, produce the copy which Acting Secretary of State Polk is known to have, and make known to the people of America the treaty terms, which are already known to the people of the conquered countries, I am able to present to the readers of 'The Tribune' one of the original copies of the document."

A bit wordy, perhaps. But you get the point.

The advent of radio in the 1920s was the first new technological challenge to newspapers, and, although it took decades to reach its full potential as a newsgathering competitor, it threw a scare into newspaper publishers.

Television, too, was slow to get out of the blocks. It was only as the medium matured and technological breakthroughs arrived that such present-day staples as remote broadcasts became commonplace. Nonetheless, the Army-McCarthy hearings were televised in 1954, and there was live coverage of political conventions even earlier.

But after the Kennedy assassination, the medium hit its stride with its coverage of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. From then on, whether it was a war in the Persian Gulf or a Ford Bronco in a low-speed chase down a Los Angeles freeway or a conflagration in Waco, Texas, or riots on Chicago's West Side, it was clear that television would always be first with any major public event.

But not necessarily best.