Book Review: Bulletins from Dallas: Reporting the JFK Assassination

Before he takes the oath of office, President-elect Donald Trump should read Bill Sanderson’s outstanding book, Bulletins from Dallas, about how the country’s two leading wire services covered President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.  Silicon Valley titans Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page (no relation to this reviewer) and Sergey Brin could stand to read it, too. 

After calling CNN “fake news” last week, Trump could use a tutorial about how reporters go about their jobs.  It’s not always pleasant – it might even take down our most sacred institutions or a favorite person – but that’s how the business operates.  At its best, it covers events and people without fear or favor and always with accuracy, balance and fairness.  Silicon Valley’s leaders could also use the book so they can discern which news is fake and which is real.

In this day and age of fake news websites and, recently, a network news anchor gone rogue, I’m sure it’s difficult to believe that two news wire services, The Associated Press and United Press International, once competed ferociously to not only get the news first but to first get it right.

The physical beating UPI White House Correspondent Merriman Smith took at the hands of his competitor, an AP reporter, is UPI lore and is vividly recounted by Sanderson, a New York Post editor, detailing how President Kennedy’s assassination was reported by the two wire services shortly after shots were fired across Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.

Sitting in the front seat of what was called the wire service car, with easy access to its radio phone, Smith quickly called UPI’s Dallas bureau once gunfire rang out, dictating details as the car followed the presidential limousine to Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy died. 

Realizing Smith was hogging the phone, the AP reporter, Jack Bell, punched Smith numerous times to get it back.  His pummeling didn’t work and a story about the shots crossed UPI’s wire before the car carrying the two reporters arrived at the hospital.  There’s even speculation Smith knocked the car’s phone out of order so UPI could maintain its increasing minute by minute lead in reporting the assassination’s details.

Nearly an hour before the White House announced Kennedy’s death, UPI did something out of the ordinary, quoting a Secret Service agent – the famous Clint Hill – that the president was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital.  UPI officially announced Kennedy’s death, based on a statement by White House Deputy Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, at 1:35 p.m. CST, and the AP followed two minutes later.

In the arena of wire service journalism, where every second and minute mattered, that was similar to losing the Super Bowl 100 - 0.  In other words, the AP was resoundingly defeated. 

UPI and AP clients, at the time, included hundreds of newspapers around the world, along with numerous television and radio stations.  They demanded accurate and fast reporting.  If they took both wire services, they often compared their reports for accuracy, speed, even writing style.

On that fateful day, most Americans didn’t realize what Smith, Bell and their cohorts were enduring to provide an accurate account of Kennedy’s death.  Instead, they saw the news delivered by the man considered the country’s most trusted news source, CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite, who spent his early years working for UPI’s predecessor, The United Press.

Like his fellow Unipresser, a term used to describe those who worked or were previously employed at UP or UPI, Cronkite was ahead of his television news competitors.  He was a man of great integrity and feared reporting Kennedy’s death until it was confirmed, knowing an erroneous report of such magnitude would ruin if not end his career.

That value is lost today.  NBC News Anchor Brian Williams was caught fudging the truth about his time covering the early days of the Iraq War in 2003.  The New York Times had its own issues with Jayson Blair, a reporter caught making up stories.  More recently, Rolling Stone magazine in 2014 reported a rape at the University of Virginia that never happened.

And while the news industry might want to be smug over Trump’s callouts of what’s fake news, it would be better served to remember that some of this problem starts with us.

Sanderson’s book traces Smith’s life from his youth in Georgia up through covering six presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.  He was a media star in his own right, writing stories for leading magazines and even appearing on television’s “The Tonight Show.”  Sanderson also shows that Smith was a Washington insider, perhaps too friendly with the presidents he covered, especially Lyndon Johnson.

The problem with today’s technology is that anyone can be a “reporter”.  But instead of having an editor review, correct and ask questions about stories before they’re published or broadcast, anyone can write a blog, publish a video, or post on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram and rarely be corrected or stopped, unless, perhaps, they say something libelous or they’re publishing an act of terrorism.  In other words, we’re in the era of fake news, deliberately or not.

As Sanderson opines, “The Internet made news faster (but) we ... gained four minutes (and) lost a lot more.”  (page 212) 

The changed habits of today’s news consumers – taking in more information online – hasn’t helped the newspaper business.  It resulted in fewer advertising dollars and fewer reporters, Sanderson writes.  In 2000, newspaper newsrooms employed 56,200 editors, reporters, photographers and support staff.  It’s down to 32,900 as of 2016. 

This decrease isn’t just compromising the news business.  It’s also harming the country.  It’s hard to believe the nation’s depleted newsrooms didn’t contribute to some of the reporting prior to the November 8^th election predicting Hillary Clinton winning the presidency.  An election involving 50 states cannot be covered from the newsroom.  Reporters need to be on the ground, finding out what the citizenry is thinking about those who would lead them.

Only now are the editors at The Times and The Boston Globe discovering states like Iowa and Wisconsin and sending reporters there.  From reading the stories, you might think they were covering foreign countries.

The news business and the United States were fortunate to have Merriman Smith and certainly a UPI which covered politicians and events across the globe as the world’s largest, independently owned news wire service. 

The wire services have suffered many setbacks since the early 1960s.  UPI is much smaller, nothing like it was twenty or thirty years ago, having been sold a few times.  It’s owned by News World Communications, a media entity founded by the Unification Church.  The AP suffers the same woes as the media industry it serves, seeing its revenues decline nearly 25 percent from their peak in 2008.

Sanderson’s book is very well sourced, and he told me both AP and UPI cooperated with him on the book.  He also said AP’s archivists worry about how UPI is maintaining its archives.  Maybe there’s a deal to be done there, with UPI allowing AP to manage and store their archives.

Smith’s life ended in tragedy in 1970 with a self-inflicted pistol shot.  He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery.  It’s a fitting tribute to him.  The man who stood for everything journalism holds near and dear – getting the story right – lays with America’s heroes, including his son, Albert, killed in 1966 while serving in the Army in Vietnam.

(Publishing details:  Bulletins from Dallas:  Reporting the JFK Assassination, Bill Sanderson.  New York:  Skyhorse Publishing, November 1, 2016)

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About me, the reviewer:  I’m a freelance reporter in Massachusetts and worked for UPI between 1984 and 1987, in Washington, Dallas, and Philadelphia.  I’m also the co-author, with Philip L. Kilbride, of Plural Marriage for Our Times:  A Reinvented Option? 2^nd Edition, Santa Barbara, CA:  Praeger Publishers, 2012.  My dad, Bob Page, was UPI’s general manager between 1975 and 1980.  He spent 20 years at UPI, from 1960 to 1980.

Link to my book:

https://www.amazon.com/Plural-Marriage-Our-Times-Reinvented/dp/0313384789

AP staff cuts: 

http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/12/ap-lays-off-25-staffers-004887

AP 2015 annual revenues:

https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2016/aps-2015-profit-rises-30-percent-on-tax-benefit-cost-cutting

BusinessInsider.com on a fake “mommy” blog:

http://www.businessinsider.com/mommy-blogger-calls-b-on-the-mommy-blogging-industry-and-admits-much-of-her-blogging-was-fake-2016-5

Cisco on fake blogs:

http://blogs.cisco.com/security/cognitive-research-fake-blogs-generating-real-money

Pew report on the U.S. newspaper industry:

http://www.journalism.org/2016/06/15/newspapers-fact-sheet/

Arlington National Cemetery obituary of Merriman Smith’s son:

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/amsmithj.htm

The New York Times story about Rolling Stone magazine’s fake rape story at the University of Virginia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/business/media/rolling-stone-rape-story-case-guilty.html?_r=0

The New York Times story about Jayson Blair:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html

The New York Times story about early voting leading to a Hillary Clinton presidential victory:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/us/politics/early-voting-registration.html

CNN & The Associated Press -- Celebrity Death Match?

The announcement that CNN would start selling its own branded news wire service reminded me of the time, about 11 years ago, when I suggested that Tribune Media Services, my employer at the time, start selling the network’s Web content.

It was clear then, as it is now, that CNN had stopped being just a broadcaster. It was also in the print business. And, through its Web site, it demonstrated that it was a viable competitor to The Associated Press, Reuters and other traditional wire services, at least on national and international stories.

As a former Unipresser, (ex-United Press International employee for those of you not familiar with the lingo and the AP’s largest competitor until about twenty years ago), I’m the first to say that the AP is a tough rival. It’ll do whatever is necessary, including price cutting, to keep its clients, called “members” by the AP, in line.

So if CNN’s Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, which will lead this undertaking, is having thoughts that his company will replace the AP, which possesses a near monopoly position with U.S. daily newspapers, his thoughts are delusional. The AP’s value doesn’t come from the stories it files from Washington, top cities around the country or even from various international datelines. It comes from the state reports.

If CNN wants to outright replace the AP, they’ll likely have to do what they thought they’d never do – provide a credible state report in all 50 states. That takes a lot of bodies, a lot of bureaus and, last but not least, a lot of money.

AP state reports are concocted through a combination of the wire service’s own reporters (if they can bother to get off their collective duffs to cover a story) and whatever their “members” contribute to the local, statewide AP report.

That’s right. The newspapers buying the AP service are required, by their contract with the news service, to also provide stories and pictures, produced by their own staff. That’s why the AP calls their clients “members” – not “clients.”

There’s a world of difference in the terms. A “member” is someone who shares an organization’s burden while a “client” is someone who pays for a service and, rightfully so, expects a decent product and decent, if not outstanding, customer service in return. At the AP, both of those things are, like, so yesterday, which is one of the reasons there’s no such thing as a satisfied AP customer or member, if you prefer.

This is one of the reasons that The Times story on Monday focused on The Columbus Dispatch, one of the largest daily newspapers in Ohio. The Dispatch, along with a few other newspapers in the Buckeye State, is working hard to drop the AP. The Dispatch and a few other newspapers regularly share their stories with one another. There’s a chance that The Dispatch and its group of rogue newspapers (as the AP sees them) will be able to provide one another with enough statewide coverage that they’ll able to drop the AP all together; at The Dispatch, this means a tidy annual savings, somewhere in the $800,000 range, according to The Times.

The national and international report that the AP provides can be easily replaced – for a lot less money – by purchasing other supplemental news services, including the Gannett News Service, the McClatchy-Tribune News Service, the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, The New York Times News Service and, perhaps, even Reuters.

Newspaper editors are frustrated, if not intensely angry, at the AP. The problem is that the AP business model – extortionary pricing for no or damn little customer service in return and a state report that’s as good as what the “members” contribute because the AP can’t be bothered to do much original reporting – is finally obsolete. At least that’s the appearance of the situation right now.

What gives me pause here is that the Dispatch’s attempt to form its own news cooperative is eerily similar to how this problem came about. One hundred and sixty years ago, a group of 10 men representing New York City’s top six newspapers formed a news agency. They named it The Associated Press.

So what The Dispatch and some of its fellow Ohio newspapers are doing is nothing new. The question is can they do a better job of providing what the AP has done for more than a century.

The AP’s problems are larger than Monday’s New York Times story let on. In addition to the new competitive threat from CNN, their tribulations include Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Hartford Courant, The Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, to name a few, which cancelled its AP contract. (It’ll take two years for Tribune to drop the AP service.) Other newspapers, sources tell me, have, in some cases, stopped paying their AP bill.

What’s playing out here involves two issues: 1. The economics of the newspaper industry, which are declining faster than anyone had ever anticipated, and 2) decisions made by both UPI and the newspaper industry about thirty years ago, which only exacerbated the AP’s already over-inflated sense of self worth.

The newspaper industry is primarily a print medium. And though revenues to its Web sites are increasing, they still don’t match what they bring in on the print side. In addition, the industry’s audience is fleeing the print product for the free one on the Web. This is because the industry has never figured out how to create value for the fantastic service, in some cases but not all, it provides through its printed editions.

The revenue decrease is forcing industry executives to make difficult calls. They include eliminating jobs, sections, areas where they previously sold copies, and outsourcing certain job functions; editors are dropping features and, as has been seen, seriously considering dropping their largest news content supplier, the AP.

UPI’s problems started back in the 1950s, when its forerunner, the United Press, merged with the Hearst-owned International News Service to form UPI. UP’s owner, the EW Scripps Company, named Scripps-Howard at the time, forced the new organization to give up the United Features Service, (later renamed United Media) which provides comics, columns and puzzles to newspapers. That meant that a large and very significant portion of the UP revenue stream was not transferred to the newly formed UPI. This meant that UPI’s future was based on a general news and picture service for newspapers and a broadcast wire and audio service for broadcasters.

UPI’s primary client base had been afternoon newspapers. As those papers stopped publishing in the 1960s and 1970s, the revenues at UPI declined. Some of the revenue loss was made up by selling the service to morning newspapers as well as to broadcasters, including CNN. Still the revenue slide couldn’t be stopped and the company lost money.

In addition, UPI’s owner couldn’t be bothered to invest in the service. A number of initiatives were brought to the attention of the UPI’s owner, but EW Scripps executives couldn’t be bothered to act on them, or, in some cases, even hear them out.

The last serious push to save UPI was done in the late 1970s, when the company attempted to sell a limited partnership to U.S. newspaper companies. Working against the plan was UPI’s owner, which insisted that it remain the largest shareholder and refused to give any of the limited partners much of say about UPI’s direction.

There was a Canadian newspaper publisher who was more than willing to sign up for the same deal that had been tabled to U.S. daily newspaper executives, but the forward-thinking EW Scripps executives rejected the overture because that would mean foreign ownership of a U.S. news service.

In addition, the level of UPI’s news gathering began to fall and, as a result, a number of editors felt they were better served signing up for the higher priced AP instead of paying for the cheaper service at UPI. A number of UPI sales executives, including yours truly, told newspaper editors they didn’t want to make the AP their only content provider.

Some editors continued with UPI, in spite of their reservations; some dropped UPI because they were tired of dealing with all of UPI’s problems (which were numerous), and others dropped UPI because they had delusions of grandeur, which included becoming part of the AP Board. The end result – AP was sitting in the driver’s seat.

CNN will face some of the same issues that UPI did. CNN is a profit center for a publicly held company, Time Warner, and its actions are dictated by one thing – the Almighty Profit Margin. CNN can afford to launch this service now because it’s flush with revenues; they always surge during national political campaigns – or any news event that gets people to tune in or head to their Web site. CNN, like UPI, will have to provide a strong value proposition for any editor to consider buying the service. CNN will run into all kinds of resistance from newspaper editors, including some who simply cannot imagine life without the AP at their paper.

In addition, the AP is a non-profit. Because it’s under no obligation to make money, the AP will slash and burn their rate card to prevent their membership base from eroding.

One of the questions that newspaper executives will need answered is what the CNN wire will look like during times of relative peace and quiet. While that day might seem hard to imagine right now, it will happen. Will CNN be able to provide the same level of service then that it can provide today, when revenues are healthy?

While a part of me very much likes the idea of CNN fighting the good fight against the AP, another part of me says this is much ado about nothing. The newspaper industry is filled with intransigence, which prevents it from taking the actions it needs to take to remain a healthy, viable industry. Newspaper executives will sing CNN’s praises publicly, but whether they’ll actually sign contracts for the network’s news wire is an entirely different matter.

So Mr. Walton, if I have any advice for you, it’s this: Keep your expectations modest.

Sources:

Deadline Every Minute: The Story of the United Press, Joe Alex Morris. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1957.

The Associated Press: The Story of News, Oliver Gamling. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940.

United Press International: Covering the 20th Century, Richard M. Harnett and Billy G. Ferguson. Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003.

"CNN Pitches Wire Service To Compete With The A.P.," The New York Times, Tim Arango and Richard Perez-Pena, December 1, 2008, pp. B3.

Pledging While Black -- The Value of Institutional Memory

Institutional memory is one of those things that's easy to lose. Replace a few executives, or key personnel, and, before you know it, the current crop of managers has no idea what their organization did or didn’t do in the past.

This means that their organization – whether it’s a major corporation, a small business, a church, a school, a college, or a sorority – is vulnerable to repeating a mistake it made once before.

I’m not here to debate the merits of history lessons – I’m all for them – but I am suggesting that if there is little or no institutional memory, then there is a higher likelihood that the organization will make a mistake that could have easily been avoided – had the managers only known the past.

More years ago than I care to count, I was student at DePauw University, a humble liberal arts school located in central Indiana, that has recently found itself the focus of The New York Times, CNN and a few other media outlets, especially in the Hoosier state.

I was a reporter for the school’s student newspaper, The DePauw, when Delta Zeta, also the focus of the media lately, decided to discriminate against an African American woman who attempted to pledge the sorority.

A few members of the sorority approached University officials, saying the student was not allowed to pledge because she was black.

Heavens to Betsy!!!! If only this girl hadn’t been PWBing everything would have been okay. I mean the nerve of some people – Pledging While Black. It’s almost as a bad as Driving While Black through a wealthy, discriminating white community!

A fellow reporter and I covered the sorority and the University’s actions against Delta Zeta. As I recall, the University asked Delta Zeta to accept the student. I can’t remember if she joined the group or not.

In the latest news, Delta Zeta’s headquarters, located in Ohio, forced out what they determined were all of the ugly girls in the DePauw chapter, saying, as a cover, that they weren’t doing all they could to make their chapter successful.

What it really came down to, according to all of the news reports, was that Delta Zeta headquarters, last Fall, decided it wanted to improve its looks at DePauw. So if you were carrying a few extra pounds or didn’t possess the kind of looks that turned a guy’s head, then you were history.

Once again, some of the girls from Delta Zeta, especially those that were forced out, approached the University, telling them they had no where to live and how they had been discriminated against because of their looks.

Had someone at Delta Zeta gone through the files, or had the organization even possessed some kind of institutional memory, there’s a good chance this wouldn’t have happened. Or, perhaps, it would have gone down differently.

That’s something that will be debated long into the future – among those who care.

What is known is that DePauw possesses a long memory. The University’s president, Bob Bottoms, has been around the campus a long time, even before I was a student there. So he knew DePauw had to respond, especially because it was the focus of some of the country’s top media outlets.

To his credit, Bottoms shut down the Delta Zeta chapter at DePauw. That’s the advantage of institutional memory. Bottoms had seen this before and he’d had enough.

Too bad no one at Delta Zeta headquarters possessed the same knowledge.

Ten or twenty years from now, Delta Zeta will likely re-open on DePauw’s campus. When they do, the sorority’s top officers will likely make sure they get their fair share of the best-looking girls they can find.