He would later suspect the man was accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.Īt CBS headquarters in New York, production personnel rushed to get anchor Walter Cronkite on the air, only to discover that there wasn’t a camera in the news studio. There he encountered a man hurriedly leaving the building. “It was like nothing I ever heard before.”Īfter learning the president had been shot, MacNeil ran into the Texas School Book Depository searching for a telephone. “The air was filled with the most intense sound of collective screaming,” he recalls. He yelled for the driver to stop and bolted outside. Robert MacNeil, then the White House correspondent for NBC, was on the media bus with the presidential motorcade when shots were heard in Dealey Plaza. Instead, they scrambled - and often struggled - to cover a heart-wrenching story as it unfolded. Working with film rather than instant video, correspondents in Texas expected to cover Kennedy’s visit via carefully prepared segments on their evening broadcasts.
Only two months before the assassination, television’s three broadcast networks expanded their nightly newscasts from 15 to 30 minutes. The seminal event took place at the dawn of a brave new media world. A lot of people did not like what they saw.” There was pushing and shoving and shouting. They discovered that it wasn’t all that dignified. “This was the first time people had ever seen the news being gathered. “Up until that weekend in Dallas, what people saw was the finished news product - the edited story and the cropped photo in their newspapers, or the packaged stories that appeared on television,” said longtime CBS journalist Bob Schieffer, who covered the slaying for the Star-Telegram in Fort Worth.
The tragedy also threw open the door to a frenetic, messy and unfiltered form of coverage that has only been amplified in today’s ultracompetitive era of 24-hour cable news stations and social media.
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