Good Profits From Bad News: How The Kennedy Assassination Helped Make Network TV News Wealthy

THE CONVERSATION

Chet Huntley and David Brinkley broadcast from the Republican National Convention in 1968. Ben Martin/Getty Images

BY MICHAEL J. SOCOLOW

In journalism, bad news sells. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a famous industry catchphrase, which explains why violent crime, war and terrorism, and natural disasters are ubiquitous on TV news.

The fact that journalists and their employers make money from troubling events is something researchers rarely explore. But even if it seems distasteful, the link between negative news and profit is important to understand. As a media historian, I think studying this topic can shed light on the forces that shape contemporary journalism.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy 60 years ago offers a case study. After a gunman killed the president, television news offered wall-to-wall, nonstop coverage at considerable cost to the networks. This earned TV news a reputation for public-spiritedness that lasted decades.

This reputation – which may seem surprising now but was widely accepted at the time – obscured the fact that TV news would soon become enormously profitable. Those profits are due in part because awful news attracts big audiences – which remains the case today.

The JFK assassination made Americans turn to TV news

Shortly after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the TV networks demonstrated their sensitivity to the tragedy by canceling commercials and devoting all their airtime to the story for several days. CBS President Frank Stanton would later call it “the longest uninterrupted story in the history of television.” At one point, 93% of all U.S. TVs were tuned into the coverage.

Estimates vary, but the networks’ decision to forgo ads may have cost them as much as US$19 million – which is $191 million in 2023 dollars.

For decades, the networks presented their assassination coverage as the epitome of public service. And over and over, network executives and journalists argued that TV news was uniquely protected from the economic pressures found elsewhere in broadcasting.

TV news in the early 1960s was “the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions,” ABC News’ Ted Koppel reminisced in The Washington Post in 2010. He added, “It never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.”

The public-service narrative that took root in November 1963 ignored the fact that the huge audiences turning to TV news for information and comfort would soon become very lucrative.

How TV news became a money machine

Only two months before Kennedy’s assassination, in September 1963, the networks expanded their evening newscasts to 30 minutes. They had previously been 15 minutes, offering little more than headlines. The expanded newscasts sold out all their advertising opportunities immediately, as television news drew the predictable daily mass audiences that sponsors craved.

The Kennedy assassination coverage, combined with the expanded newscasts, significantly increased the commercial value of TV news. Throughout the 1960s, broadcast journalism began to mature into the most lucrative genre of programming on American television.

By the 1965-1966 television season, NBC’s “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” generated $27 million in advertising a year, making it the network’s most lucrative program – out-earning even “Bonanza,” the top entertainment show. “The CBS Evening News” was drawing in $25.5 million in advertising, making it the second-most profitable program on U.S. television.

Around this time, networks were telling regulators that they had sacrificed millions of dollars for public service through journalism. For example, in 1965 testimony before the Federal Communications Commission, executives from ABC, CBS and NBC said their news divisions had loftier motives than simply making money.

But they were making money, and lots of it. By 1969, “Huntley-Brinkley” was earning $34 million in advertising on a production budget of $7.2 million, making the program – according to Fortune magazine – “the biggest source of revenue that the N.B.C. network has – bigger than ‘Laugh-In’ or ‘The Dean Martin Show.’” A decade earlier, “Huntley-Brinkley” had been making just $8 million in ad and sponsorship revenue.

The networks didn’t tout their profits, though. Instead, they continually promoted their efforts covering the Vietnam War, civil unrest and the assassinations of the 1960s as service in the public interest. They also claimed that news production cost them millions, and they hid ad revenues accrued by news programming elsewhere in their corporate budgets. Doing this gave them a leg up on regulatory privileges, such as station license renewals.

The birth of modern TV news

Ultimately, the chaotic, cacophonous and confusing decade of the 1960s would end up launching the hyper-commercial media world we live in today. Chasing sensational investigative stories, such as Watergate and the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, would generate higher ratings and more advertising revenue, and turn broadcast journalists into national celebrities.

The original values animating network broadcast journalism at its inception would surrender to more lucrative formats. “60 Minutes” – a CBS News production – eventually became the most valuable network-owned programming property in the history of American television, and by the 1980s almost every local news station had launched its own “I-Team” investigations group.

Eventually, the professionalism that drew audiences to TV news in the wake of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 would be supplanted by audience growth strategies sold by TV news consultants. Audience analytics, minute-by-minute engagement metrics and Q-scores calibrating anchor “likability” would standardize formats and homogenize newsgathering in the drive to maximize profits.

Yet through the decades, one constant remains: Bad news sells. It’s a media-industry truism whether we’d like to study it or not, and the news broadcasts airing today, 60 years after the events of November 1963, prove it.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Book Review: “The Final Witness” — Just the Facts

Paul Landis

BY BOB KATZ

Strangely, Paul Landis makes no acknowledgment of the implications of the evidence he attests to, namely that neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor any other single gunman could have acted alone.

I’m trying hard to imagine what it would be like to read Paul Landis’ book, The Final Witness, if I didn’t know what I already know. How would it read if, a full month before publication, the book’s single newsworthy element had not been widely reported in the New York Times, CNN, Vanity Fair, NBC, and the Dallas Morning News?

Moreover, I wonder what it would be like to read this book, subtitled “A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years,” if I had not myself, once upon a time, fervently believed that the JFK assassination was of great importance and that it could, with sufficient resources, be successfully investigated and ultimately solved.

In other words, how would this book read if one accepted it for what it purports to be, the modest memoir of an unheralded individual who, having been thrust dead center into one of the pivotal events of modern American history, happened to notice something that maybe we should all know about.

The story opens with Landis as a recent college graduate living with his parents in Worthington, OH. The year is 1957. Vocationally aimless, he signs up with the Ohio Air National Guard. Faced with an empty summer before training begins, he heads out on an extended road trip with a college buddy. Badlands, Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, pitching tent, yakking with strangers, stretching his wings. For a fleeting moment it seemed this excursion was going to accelerate into a fevered Kerouacian quest to grasp the quicksilver essence of our fraught and sprawling nation. That would make for a nifty run-up to a narrative that we realize, spoiler alert baked in, is bound to culminate in an epic nightmare.

Given this subject, readers will be predisposed to look for clues, at the very least clues that Landis realizes his account will be scoured and scrutinized for clues. Alas, he doesn’t make it easy. Young Paul Landis doesn’t seem to be searching for anything beyond a little adventure and a bit of self-actualization.

Hiking along a northern California beach by Highway 101, he witnesses a brutal car accident. Screeching tires, crunched metal, injured passengers by the side of the road. Is this a deft foreshadowing of you know what? “We waited quite a while for the police and an ambulance,” Landis writes drily, “but once they arrived, Paul (his traveling companion) and I gave our statements and we were again on our way.”

I lingered over that for a moment. He gave a statement and was on his way.

After completing his National Guard training, Landis returns to Ohio. He’s living with his parents, working at Wilson’s Men’s Wear, honing his golf game, aimless again. When a family friend who’d become a Secret Service agent stops by for a visit, something clicks. Landis writes, “I began thinking that being able to protect the president of the United States had to be the coolest job in the universe.”

The rest, as they say, is . . .



Landis fills out an application and is hired so readily, by his telling, as to raise questions concerning the requisite qualifications. Affability? Check. Propensity to follow instructions? Check. Absence of outstanding demerits? Check. At least five foot eight? “I stretched as much as I could without standing on my tiptoes.”

Assigned to the Cincinnati field office, he specializes in check forgeries and takes a rented room with a widowed grandmother who lovingly prepares home-cooked dinners for him even though he doesn’t always come home on time. Can it get any more bland?

Yes it can. Landis is transferred to Gettysburg, PA where he becomes part of the Secret Service detail guarding President Eisenhower’s four grandchildren and, eventually, the President himself. Highlight: Protecting Ike during a round of eighteen at the fabled Augusta National Golf Course.

Landis describes all this in a straightforward manner with almost nothing in the way of embellishment, commentary, or personal reflection. Just the facts, M’am, is clearly his stylistic preference and seemingly his guiding philosophy. It doesn’t make for scintillating reading and one gets the urge, familiar to fans of pornography, to skip ahead to the good stuff. Because something is brewing. We know it even if there’s nary a hint that guileless SSA Landis knows it.

John F. Kennedy is elected president. Camelot’s in bloom. Landis is assigned to Jackie and the kids. Watching him go about his mundane duties, escorting Caroline as she rides her pony, accompanying Jackie on antiquing expeditions, one wonders what exactly his professional toolkit consists of and what he does to keep himself sharp. Working the midnight shift at the White House, Landis writes, “Booooring. We were not allowed to read on post, so I used to while away the time counting the holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles outside the Oval Office, or the number of floor tiles in the hallway.”

The months fly by. “At the end of a summer in Hyannis Port, we would move on to Newport, Rhode Island to visit Mrs. Kennedy’s mother and stepfather . . . at Hammersmith Farm, the estate where Mrs. Kennedy had grown up. After a month or so in Newport, it was off to Palm Beach for most of the winter. Then, in spring, it would be back to the White House, spending weekends in Middleburg, Virginia (where Jackie has leased an estate.)”

Politics? There’s not much. A glancing reference to the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is the exception although this does allow Landis – tellingly? – a segue into the December 29, 1962 trip to the Orange Bowl in Miami where the President was feted by surviving members of Brigade 2506, the CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles that had launched a failed attempt in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

Cuba. Castro. Bay of Pigs. CIA. Cuban exiles. JFK. Each of these is a potent hashtag in any discussion of the Kennedy assassination. Is Landis at last starting to zero in?

“We had a white Lincoln convertible there,” he writes, “to drive the president and Mrs. Kennedy out of the stadium to their waiting helicopter. I was told to cover the left rear of the car, where I walked and jogged as we departed the Orange Bowl. This was my first OJT {on job training} experience covering a moving vehicle in which the president and the first lady were riding.”

Then it’s onto Texas.

In recounting his super-charged encounter with the events of November 22, 1963, Landis does not deviate from this monotone approach. He was positioned on the right rear running board on the open air convertible directly following the presidential limousine. He heard gunshots. He saw the President’s skull explode in a spray of blood. He leapt into the rear seat of the convertible as the motorcade raced away. Outside Parkland Hospital, he tried to coax a traumatized Jackie, who “was holding what was left of the President’s head in her lap,” to exit the limo. When Jackie finally rose up, he spotted atop the cushioning of the leather seat a completely intact, copper-jacketed bullet. He picked up the bullet. He slipped it into his suitcoat pocket. The hospital corridor was a chaotic madhouse. JFK’s lifeless body was moved onto an examining table in Trauma Room #1. “I removed the bullet from my pocket and reaching out over the examination table, I carefully placed it on the white cotton blanket next to the president’s left shoe. . . . I had saved an important piece of evidence and placed it . . . where it would be found and prove to be helpful.”

That’s it. Landis has nothing more to add. Having quietly planted a land mine, he walks away with a shrug, dodging even the most obvious, two-plus-two-equals-four type of conclusion. Strangely, he makes no acknowledgment of the implications of the evidence he attests to, namely that neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor any other single gunman could have acted alone.

Without rehashing the whole hornet’s nest of intricate forensic details – look up “magic bullet theory” if you’re interested – Landis’ disclosure that the intact bullet came from President Kennedy and not from Texas Governor John Connally, who was also seated in the limousine and was severely wounded, effectively refutes the official Warren Commission conclusion that one person using the bolt action rifle attributed to Oswald could have fired all the shots in Dealey Plaza during that fatal six second time frame.

So what now, America, sixty years later? Paul Landis’ tale is not Jim Garrison’s A Heritage of Stone. It is not Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. It is not Robert Blakey’s The Fatal Hour, or Oliver Stone’s JFK. Declining even to acknowledge that the assassination might be still unsolved, even while presenting something close to proof of exactly that, Landis is not about to speculate as to whodunnit. Presumably that will be left to folks who care about such things.

An iconic Getty photo of JFK’s funeral appears on one of the final pages of the book. It shows the Kennedy family grimly gathered outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral on a brisk November morning. Jackie, veiled in black, is flanked by Ted and Bobby as the fatherless toddler John Jr. gamely salutes the passing casket. Paul Landis stands behind the boy, solemnly looking on.

Landis states he’s waited all these decades to tell his story because the assassination left him traumatized (he quit the secret service the following year) and, having refused to pay any attention to the many controversies about the case, he was therefore unaware of the significance of the bullet he found. We have no choice but to take him at his word.

One gets the sense that by writing this book SSA Landis believes he’s made good on his assignment. He’s fulfilled his obligation to the truth by taking appropriate steps to enter into the historical record a unique piece of evidence. He writes, “I have shared what I saw, what I did, and only what I know to be factual about that November weekend.”

If the historical record was all that mattered, he indeed would have done his duty.

Bob Katz was a founder of the Assassination Information Bureau, a public interest group that lobbied for a re-investigation of the JFK and MLK murders. His novel, Waiting for Al Gore, will be published in February 2024. }

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Reputed Mobster Pleads Not Guilty In 1978 Heist

FBI agents flank Vincent Asaro as they escort the reputed mobster from FBI offices in lower Manhattan, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2014, in New York. More than 30 years after the crime, Asaro was indicted in the $6 million Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport that was dramatized in the Martin Scorsese movie "Goodfellas."

NEW YORK (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — More than 30 years after hooded gunmen pulled a $6 million airport heist dramatized in the hit Martin Scorsese movie "Goodfellas," an elderly reputed mobster was arrested at his New York City home on Thursday and charged in the robbery and a 1969 murder.

Vincent Asaro, 78, was named along with his son, Jerome, and three other defendants in wide-ranging indictment alleging murder, robbery, extortion, arson and other crimes from the late 1960s through last year. The Asaros, both identified as captains in the Bonanno organized crime family, pleaded not guilty through their attorneys and were ordered held without bail at a brief appearance in federal court in Brooklyn.

The elder Asaro's attorney, Gerald McMahon, told reporters outside court that his client was framed by shady turncoat gangsters, including former Bonanno boss Joseph Massino - the highest-ranking member of the city's five organized crime families to break the mob's vow of silence.

Massino "is one of the worst witnesses I've ever seen," McMahon said. He added that Asaro had given him "marching orders" that "there will be no plea and he will walk out the door a free man." A lawyer for Jerome Asaro declined comment.

The indictment accused Vincent Asaro of helping to direct the Dec. 11, 1978, Lufthansa Airlines heist at Kennedy airport - one of the largest cash thefts in American history. The gunmen looted a vault in the airline's cargo terminal and stole about $5 million in untraceable U.S. currency that was being returned to the United States from Germany, along with about $1 million in jewelry. The cash was never found.

According to court papers, an unidentified mob associate who pleaded guilty and became a cooperating witness told investigators that he participated in the robbery at the direction of Asaro. The theft was hatched by James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, a late Lucchese crime family associate who was close to Asaro, who told the bandits that he had a "score" that would make them rich, the papers say.

Each robber was supposed to be paid $750,000, but the cooperating witness said "most did not receive their share, either because they were killed first or it was never given to them," according to the court papers.

The papers say the cooperator wore a wire and recorded a conversation he had with Asaro in 2011 in which the pair discussed being slighted. "We never got our right money, what we were supposed to get," Asaro said, according to the court papers. "Jimmy Burke kept everything."

In addition to the heist, the elder Asaro was charged in the 1969 murder of Paul Katz, whose remains were found last year during an FBI dig at a house once occupied by Burke. According to the cooperating witness, Asaro and Burke were business partners in Robert's Lounge, the papers say. The saloon was described by a fellow Lucchese associate of Burke, the late Henry Hill, as Burke's private cemetery.

"Jimmy buried over a dozen bodies ... under the bocce courts," Hill wrote in his book, "A Goodfella's Guide to New York." Katz once owned a warehouse where mobsters stored stolen goods, according to the court papers. After a raid at the warehouse, Asaro and Burke began to suspect Katz was a law enforcement informant.

Asaro told the cooperator that Burke "had killed Katz with a dog chain because they believed he was a 'rat,'" the papers say. The cooperator told investigators that Asaro and Burke brought Katz's body to a vacant home in Queens where it was concealed beneath a cement floor. In the 1980s, Burke ordered the cooperator to dig up the remains and move them to another location.

Burke inspired Robert De Niro's character in "Goodfellas," which was based on Nicholas Pileggi's book "Wiseguy" and told the story of Hill's time in the mob and subsequent cooperation with law enforcement.

Massino was convicted in 2004 on charges he had a hand in multiple gangland murders, including the execution of a mobster who vouched for FBI undercover agent Donnie Brasco - a story that was also turned into a movie.

In July, Massino saw his life prison sentence reduced to time served after prosecutors praised his work as a government cooperator.

RFK Jr.: 'It was not a lone gunman' who killed JFK

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told an audience at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas that he doesn't believe a lone gunman was responsible for his uncle's 1963 assassination.

DALLAS (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn't solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship."

Kennedy and his sister, Rory, spoke about their family Friday night while being interviewed in front of an audience by Charlie Rose at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. The event comes as a year of observances begins for the 50th anniversary of the president's death.

Their uncle was killed on Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through Dallas. Five years later, their father was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel while celebrating his win in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his father spent a year trying to come to grips with his brother's death, reading the work of Greek philosophers, Catholic scholars, Henry David Thoreau, poets and others "trying to figure out kind of the existential implications of why a just God would allow injustice to happen of the magnitude he was seeing."

He said his father thought the Warren Commission, which concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president, was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship." He said that he, too, questioned the report.

"The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman," he said, but he didn't say what he believed may have happened.

Rose asked if he believed his father, the U.S. attorney general at the time of his brother's death, felt "some sense of guilt because he thought there might have been a link between his very aggressive efforts against organized crime."

Kennedy replied: "I think that's true. He talked about that. He publicly supported the Warren Commission report but privately he was dismissive of it."

He said his father had investigators do research into the assassination and found that phone records of Oswald and nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days after the president's assassination, "were like an inventory" of mafia leaders the government had been investigating.

He said his father, later elected U.S. senator in New York, was "fairly convinced" that others were involved.

The attorney and well-known environmentalist also told the audience light-hearted stories Friday about memories of his uncle. As a young child with an interest in the environment, he said, he made an appointment with his uncle to speak with him in the Oval Office about pollution.

He'd even caught a salamander to present to the president, which unfortunately died before the meeting.

"He kept saying to me, `It doesn't look well,"' he recalled.

Rory Kennedy, a documentary filmmaker whose recent film "Ethel" looks at the life of her mother, also focused on the happier memories. She said she and her siblings grew up in a culture where it was important to give back.

"In all of the tragedy and challenge, when you try to make sense of it and understand it, it's very difficult to fully make sense of it," she said. "But I do feel that in everything that I've experienced that has been difficult and that has been hard and that has been loss, that I've gained something in it."

"We were kind of lucky because we lost our members of our family when they were involved in a great endeavor," her brother added. "And that endeavor is to make this country live up to her ideals."

--------JAMIE STENGLE/AP

Memorable Images and Time

23 Oct 1962, San Francisco, California, USA --- 10/23/1962-San Francisco, CaliforniaNew middleweight champion Dick Tiger is hoisted on the shoulders of his Nigerian countrymen after he won a 15-round title bout against former champ Gene Fullmer at Candlestick Park. --- Image by Bettmann/CORBIS



05 Oct 1954, Mackinac Island, Michigan, USA --- George Daneel, prominent South African and Springbok rugby player, is shown chatting with Adolphus Mbah (left) and Chief Yakubu Tali at the Moral Rearmament Assembly on Mackinac Island. Mbah is vice president of the Nigerian Federation of Trade Unions. Chief Tali is a member of the Gold Coast Parliament and president of the Northern Territories Council. At an interracial meeting in Capetown Daneel recently made a public apology for his attitude of superiority towards the other races in Africa. Segregation is rigidly enforced in South Africa. --- Image by Bettmann/CORBIS




14 Jun 1962 --- Nigerian parliamentarians pose for a photograph while on a visit with President John F. Kennedy



12/10/1974-Washington, D.C.- World heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali and his brother Herbert Clay (L) meet with President Ford at the White House. Ali said he liked the White House, and just might go after the job. Ford said there were times he'd be happy to let him have it.