When Dan Rather first took the CBS anchor chair on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after the second World Trade Center tower had been hit, he flashed back 38 years.
“It was along the lines of “This is not just like Nov. 22, 1963,”‘ he recalls. “”But it’s a lot like it in the sense that you’re not likely to have a bigger story.’ “
He said to himself, “Steady.”
When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas 40 years ago this week, Rather was part of a team of reporters and anchors who forged modern TV news. Much of what we saw, and felt, on Sept. 11 was the reflection of a model set on Nov. 22: non-stop coverage led by calm, reassuring anchors.
That formula, according to Marquette University’s Lucius W. Nieman Professor of Journalism Philip Seib, unites the country in time of crisis.
“Wherever you were, if you were in New York or Los Angeles, or Chicago or Milwaukee, you were seeing basically the same images,” Seib says. “What television did in that instance and has done since is that it reinforces the sense of nationhood by providing these common images.”
Television news was already on the rise before Kennedy was shot. CBS and NBC had expanded their nightly newscasts to 30 minutes in the months before the assassination.
“Television was on its way to becoming the dominant medium for the distribution of information,” says CNN’s Jeff Greenfield. “But certainly, when the country got up from four days in front of the tube (in 1963) … you couldn’t have any doubt about that any more.”
Television was well established in its dominant role on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. ABC, CBS and NBC were in the middle of their morning news shows when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. Soon there were live pictures of the second plane hitting the second tower and of damage at the Pentagon.
Back in 1963, CBS viewers heard the disembodied voice of Walter Cronkite reading the first wire service bulletin of shots being fired at the president’s motorcade. All they saw was a slide that read “CBS News Bulletin.”
“They didn’t have a television camera warmed up in those days,” says Bob Schieffer, now a veteran CBS correspondent. “It took a while to get your cameras warmed up and technically ready to broadcast.”
The scene was similar at the other networks. NBC didn’t start recording until a few minutes into its live coverage, so its first reports are lost to history.
And television’s technical limitations showed up two days later. When Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death by Jack Ruby, only NBC was live, while the two other networks carried pictures from Washington. Today, both scenes would have been shown on a split screen.
Once the word of Kennedy’s death was confirmed, normal television stopped. It wouldn’t resume until after the president was buried in Arlington National Cemetery the following Monday.
The cornerstone of CBS’ coverage – and a prototype for the anchors who have followed him – was Walter Cronkite.
Forty years later, black-and-white videotape of Cronkite in shirt sleeves, nervously putting on his glasses and then taking them off as he announced official word of the president’s death, still offers a gut-wrenching image – as stunning in its own right as the second plane hitting the second tower.
“When Walter Cronkite announced the death of Kennedy, you know, “Here’s the word from Dallas, apparently official, President Kennedy is dead,’ and he chokes up, that was in and of itself, an event,” says CNN’s Greenfield, who was editor of the Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in November 1963. “That emotional impact was overwhelming.”
In talking about Cronkite as anchor, Rather uses his own one-word mantra: “steady.”
“If you review Walter Cronkite’s reporting on Nov. 22, 1963, you’ll see evidence of a similar guiding process at work in how he handled it. He may not have said to himself, as I said to myself on 9-11 several times, “Steady … steady now.’ But it was certainly a guiding part of his tone.”
Fast forward nearly four decades, and, on the surface, TV news is very different from what it was in 1963.
First, there’s more of it. While the three broadcast networks remain, there’s a world of cable channels – including three all-news outlets with the ability to provide news 24 hours a day.
“The day of the Kennedy assassination, most television stations in the country, I think all of them, went off the air about 12:30, 1 o’clock,” Rather says. “You can’t imagine it today.”
Cable news channels helped change that and created a 24-hour news cycle. But CNN’s Greenfield suggests that the scope of the news story on Sept. 11 created its own round-the-clock coverage, without cable news influencing how the story played out.
“It was covered instantly and for days by everybody,” he says.
More consistent with modern TV news was viewership during the U.S. attack on Iraq earlier this year. Ratings for cable news outlets soared, while ratings for network newscasts dipped.
One thing that did influence TV coverage of the Sept. 11 terror attacks was a new competitor: the Internet.
“It’s the first time we’ve had this vehicle to distribute news nationally that’s not edited,” says Schieffer, who reported live on the attack on the Pentagon for CBS. “We spent most of our time in the hours and the days after 9-11 knocking down incorrect information that was coming out of the Internet.”
There were stories of other planes in the air long after the government had confirmed that there weren’t.
“We had to correct these mistakes, because it could have set off mass-hysteria and panic if we didn’t,” Schieffer says.
Despite the fact that television had evolved remarkably between 1963 and 2001, anchors played much the same role on Sept. 11 as they did after Kennedy was shot.
“They are the people whose job it is to take the audience through a very difficult time, get them information and do it in a way that is comforting,” Greenfield says. “There’s nothing manipulative about it. That’s what they do.”
Says Marquette’s Seib: “There’s a quasi-political role that a network anchor plays in a time of national crisis. We actually see more of the network anchors than we see of our real political leaders.
“We turn to the anchors, not just for an implicit reassurance that things are continuing. That there isn’t total chaos. That the system hasn’t broken down.”
Ratings showed that Sept. 11 viewers turned to the three old-line broadcast networks that had reported the Kennedy assassination, rather than flocking to cable news channels.
Nielsen Media Research numbers showed that an estimated 60.5 million people were watching prime-time coverage on the big four broadcast networks – including Fox – on the night of Sept. 11. Fewer than 15 million were tuned to the three cable news channels – CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC – at that time.
Nielsen numbers from 1963 – quoted in a 1964 TV Guide analysis of assassination coverage – reported that 41.6 million TV sets were in use the afternoon of Kennedy’s funeral on Nov. 25.
“People go to the familiar, and the networks have been around a long time,” Schieffer says of viewers on Sept. 11. “It’s like going to an old friend, rather than a new friend.
“There was a lot of talk at that point that the network news was going away. I think those days showed there is still a place for network news.”
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WHERE THEY WERE
A group of reporters who would become some of the top TV journalists in America covered the Kennedy assassination in November 1963:
– PETER JENNINGS reported for Canada’s CTV from Dallas in 1963. He is now anchor of “ABC World News Tonight.”
– JIM LEHRER was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1963. He now anchors PBS’ “Jim Lehrer News Hour.”
– ROBERT MacNEIL was an NBC News correspondent in Dallas in 1963. He retired as co-anchor of PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” in October 2001.
– DAN RATHER reported for CBS from Dallas in 1963. He is now anchor and managing editor of the “CBS Evening News.”
– BOB SCHIEFFER was a police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1963. He is now CBS’ chief Washington correspondent and host of “Face the Nation.”
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PROGRAMMING FOCUSES ON KENNEDY
Here are highlights of TV programs marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (all times EST):
For a look at how Dallas television covered a presidential visit that went horribly wrong, check out “JFK: Breaking the News,” airing at 10 p.m. Wednesday on PBS (check local listings).
ABC News reports on its own investigation of whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination – Beyond Conspiracy,” airs at 9 p.m. Thursday.
CNN repeats its one-hour look at the reporters who covered the story, “CNN Presents: President Kennedy Has Been Shot,” at 8 p.m. Saturday.
Here are some other Kennedy-themed documentaries airing over the next few days:
-“Unsolved History” (8 p.m. Wednesday, Discovery Channel): Episode of the documentary series looks at the Kennedy assassination.
-“JFK Assassination: Investigation Reopened” (9 p.m. Wednesday, Court TV): Another look at the evidence in the case.
-“JFK: A Presidency Revealed” (8 p.m. Saturday, History Channel): A new look at the 1,000 days of Kennedy’s presidency.
-“JFK: The Day that Changed America” (10 p.m. Saturday, MSNBC): The cable news channel looks back 40 years.
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AP-NY-11-18-03 0828EST
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