Media Response

On Monday November 25, 1963, Dan Rather of CBS was the first reporter to view the Zapruder film and describe what he saw. At that point the assumption had been made that the shots came from the sixth floor of the TSBD, presumably because that’s where the rifle and shells had been found. Dan Rather clearly got a close viewing of the film because he accurately describes JFK’s right hand motions and Connolly’s turning movements. However, when describing the head shot, he says that when the President was hit, his head went violently forward. This is the opposite of what is shown in the film. Why would he lie about this? Granted, by Monday, LBJ and the FBI had settled on the lone nut scenario, but who ordered Rather to participate in the cover up?

On the afternoon of the assassination, journalist Seth Kantor called another journalist, Hal Hendrix in Miami, who provided Kantor with a detailed background on Oswald, including his defection to Russia and his association with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Some speculate that this early release of information on Oswald was a CIA propaganda effort by the CIA, because Hendrix had such a close affiliation with the CIA that he once reported on a coup in the Dominican Republic before it had happened. While researchers have been unable to confirm that Hendrix’s disclosures had not come from public sources, it is interesting to note that the phone record of Kantor’s call with Hendrix were classified as secret due to national security.

On 29th November LIFE Magazine, published a series of 31 photographs documenting the entire shooting sequence from the Zapruder film. It was only later discovered that the critical frames that depicted the rearward motion of Kennedy’s head were transposed to indicate a forward motion.

When the Warren Commission Report was published, it also reversed Zapruder frames Z314 and Z315.

The Zapruder film was controlled by LIFE magazine and bootleg versions depicting the actual movements were not widely seen by the American public until shown on Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America show on March 6, 1975.

There was early controversy about a potential shot from the front prompted by a news conference at Parkland Hospital in which Dr. Malcolm Perry described what appeared to be an entrance wound in JFK’s neck.

LIFE Magazine attempted to defuse this controversy in a December 6 article by Paul Mandel:
“Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed – toward the sniper’s nest – just before he clutches it.”

Given that LIFE magazine had sole custody of the Zapruder film, they certainly knew this was a lie. So why would they lie? The most likely answer is that by December 6, the official lone nut story had been long decided in Washington. The White House administration and the FBI had close symbiotic working relationships with the media and the media was run by conservative men, veterans of World War II who respected and were aligned with the power structures in Washington. The article, JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story describes how the mainstream media outlets distorted their reporting to support the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

What is interesting is that in the over 60 years since the assassination, the mainstream media has been unwavering in its support of the Warren Commission, ignoring the evidence of LBJ’s cover up, the HSCA and the ARRB revelations about Kostikov. How can that be explained? Perhaps institutional pride prevented them from admitting how uncritical their previous reporting had been, and the longer their mistake had continued, the harder it was to reverse it. Perhaps the reasons for promoting the cover up in 1963 still prevailed: it was easier for both the government and the media to promote a lone nut story than to admit that institutions like the Secret Service, the FBI and the Warren Commission had failed in their tasks. Or perhaps it was obvious to some that people within the CIA may have been involved in the assassination conspiracy, as evidenced by Oswald’s background, the false CIA reporting out of Mexico City and Angleton’s office, or the likelihood of the CIA’s anti-Castro assassination plots behaving backfired against JFK; revealing the truth would cause a fundamental loss of faith by the American people in their government.

The relationship between the CIA and the media is a very interesting one which is seldom critically examined. Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote a fascinating article in 1977 for Rolling Stone titled The CIA and the Media: How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

Bernstein’s description of a close working relationship between hundreds of American journalists and the CIA is descriptive of a longstanding domestic CIA propaganda operation started in the 1950’s called Operation Mockingbird.

The CIA is prohibited by law from domestic operations: “the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions” but that restriction has been ignored as in Operation CHAOS.

With respect to the Kennedy assassination, the CIA started a program in 1967 to utilize their media assets to counter criticism of the Warren Commission. To what extent the CIA continues this program today, we don’t know.

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