Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 307 pages
• Published by: University Of Chicago Press October 1, 1993
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0226979717
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0226979717
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 15.8 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
A useful scholarly book on the media's efforts to promote themselves as authorities in our collective memory of JFK's assassination.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A former reporter for the Reuters News Agency and an assistant professor of rhetoric and communications, Zelizer asks why the news media, trained to present information in narrative form, spend so much time defending their coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy. She suggests that since no journalist in Dallas at the time actually saw the shooting, each one instead strives for acceptance as an authority in the creation of a national collective memory, which is more emotional than the journalistic story. She details this legitimizing process in an interesting and useful scholarly book that is more for media experts than Kennedy assassination groupies.
- Abraham Z. Bass, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
There is some very significant baby in this academese- obscurantist bathwater. 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.