This is the sad historical fact: the truth about most traumatic event of the 20th century has been kept from the American people for forty years.
http://www.abclies.com/policoff.htmlJFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story
If the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was one of the darkest tragedies in the republic's history, the reporting of it has remained one of the worst travesties of the American media. From the first reports out of Dallas in November of 1963 to the merciless flagellation of Oliver Stone's JFK over the last several months, the mainstream media have disgraced themselves by hewing blindly to the single-assassin theory advanced by the FBI within hours of the murder. Original, enterprise reporting has been left almost entirely to alternative weeklies, monthly magazines, book publishers, and documentary makers. All such efforts over the last 29 years have met the same fate as Oliver Stone's movie: derision from the mainstream media. At first, the public bought the party line. But gradually, as more and more information slipped through the margins of the media business, and finally through the efforts of Congress itself, the public began to change its mind.
Today, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, an astonishing 77 percent of Americans reject the Warren Report's conclusions. How did such a tremendous credibility gap come about? And, assuming that the majority of Americans are right, how did a free press so totally blow one of the biggest stories of the century? To find out, Village Voice has reviewed hundreds of documents bearing on the media's coverage of the assassination, and has discovered a pattern of collusion and co-optation that is hardly less chilling than the prospect of a conspiracy to kill the president. In particular, The New York Times, Time-Life, CBS, and NBC have striven mightily to protect the single assassin hypothesis, even when that has involved the suppression of information, the coercion of testimony, and the misrepresentation of key evidence. The Voice has discovered that: Within days of the assassination, the Justice Department quashed an editorial in The Washington Post that called for an independent investigation; within two weeks the FBI was able to crow that NBC had pledged not to report anything beyond what the FBI itself was putting before the American people; only four hours after the murder, Life magazine grabbed up one of the main pieces of evidence --- the Zapruder film --- misrepresenting the content to millions of readers in its very first post-assassination issue and then continuing the lie with ever-changing captions and Zapruder frames in its special issue supporting the Warren Commission report; in 1967, a supposedly independent CBS documentary series on the assassination was in fact secretly reviewed and seemingly altered by former Warren Commission member John Jay McCloy, through a "Dad says" memo written by his daughter Ellen McCloy, then administrative assistant of CBS News president Richard Salant; within that same CBS series, the testimony of Orville Nix --- an amateur filmmaker who captured the "the grassy knoll" angle on tape --- was tailored to fit the requirements of CBS's Warren Commission slant. Much of this unethical and immoral practice was accomplished under the pretext of "sparing the Kennedy family."
Indeed, the coverage of the assassination was complicated by the cross-identification between reporters and the president. The Kennedys were the first, and possibly the last, American political family to so thoroughly cultivate the fourth estate; in the aftermath of the assassination, the media completely relinquished its usual skepticism and opened the door for the government to do whatever it found most expedient. What possible motive could the national media have for failing to properly investigate the Kennedy murder? Perhaps they were genuinely seduced by this "Camelot" they themselves created. And if anyone was going to end Camelot, far better for the memories, far better for the family, that it be a lone psycho than a conspiracy. And if the media were solicitous to the Kennedys in this way, they were positively patronizing to the citizenry. It was Vietnam all over again: the war was good for the country, so don't report how badly it was going; a conspiracy to kill the president would be demoralizing at home and humiliating abroad, so sweep under the rug any evidence pointing in that direction. And then of course there was the national security issue.
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