This book is an overlooked gem. It is overlooked because it is written an in academise "discoursy" style that characterized acemese around the 1990s'
But the reason it is so essential to read this is because it was written by a journalism professor. Barbie Zelizer was at Temple at the time and has since gone on to the premier communications research school the Annenbergh sp? School of Communications at U Penn. This is the kind of place with connected soda machines!
Here is a review I wrote on Amazon/ PLEASE READ THIS I NEED TO TALK WITH OTHERS ABOUT THIS BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH HERE IT IS ALMOST FRIGHTENING!
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http://www.amazon.com/Covering-Body-Ken ... 0226979717
Basically this is an instiutional approach to explaining why the media got it wrong. Does the author put it like this? Not exactly. The woman needs a job!
She argues that the Kennedy Assasination took place at a key time for TV news; in 1963 the networks had just switched form a 15 minute to a half-hour broadcast. The assassination, she argues, made TV news. The later you get the more reporters and editors interjected what they were doing at the time; thier identities and the legitimacy of TV journalism itself had become married to a single bullet, even though it was much more of a shotgun wedding.
Some of the narrative desriptions of individual reporters are priceless. Zelizer does a masterful job of capturing the chaos of the telphone truck, where there was only one phone. Sometimes these narratives of direct reporter experience seem to yearn for conclusions beyone those modest ones that the professor presents.
Don't be put off by the cumbersome style of this book. It is worth reading twice. It goes far toward explaining why the Corporate Media have worked so dilligently to cast Warren Commission Sceptics in such a condescending light. Just so, those aristocratic flat-earthers!
This book is simply too dangerous to be written clearly
