Is it possible for Americans to commemorate the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death without the media taking potshots at the Right?
Consider former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw who while on MSNBC’s The Cycle Friday recounting where he was when Kennedy was shot decided he needed to make the case that people in conservative states wanted the president killed (video follows with transcript and commentary):
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago by a Communist sympathizer, yet Friday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC ran a package that emphasized right-wing hate in Dallas while failing to mention Lee Harvey Oswald or his ideological leanings. The package, narrated by Brian Shactman, focused on the “unspoken speech” that President Kennedy was planning to give on the day he was shot.
Shactman just couldn’t help but mention those hateful right-wingers:
My parents voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. I had not yet developed a political worldview, but as a freshman at American University in Washington, D.C., I stayed up late to watch the election returns slowly trickle in before going to bed at 2 a.m. with the outcome still undecided.
The following year I was hired as a copyboy at NBC News, delivering wire service "copy" to news reporters in the network's Washington bureau. White House correspondent Sander Vanocur invited me to accompany him to observe the swearing-in of Adlai Stevenson as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
As media predictably gush and fawn over John F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, it seems a metaphysical certitude precious few will take an honest look at his actual accomplishments as president.
Fox News Sunday did exactly that this week with Brit Hume saying, "[H]e has been the subject of the most successful public relations campaign in political history" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
The left will never get over the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald, a self-described Marxist who had previously claimed to be a communist, assassinated John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
The latest evidence of that detachment from reality came online Saturday evening at the New York Times, and appeared in today's print edition. Writer James McAuley, described as "a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford," wrote that Dallas collectively "willed the death of the president," and that it has prospered disproportionately in the subsequent 50 years because of "pretending to forget."
Corrected from earlier (see below) | Three famous men died on Nov. 22, 1963. The one getting the most attention, understandably, is John F. Kennedy. Less so the other two: Aldous Huxley, author of the futuristic novel "Brave New World," and Clive Staples Lewis.
Of the three, it was Lewis who not only was the most influential of his time, but whose reach extends to these times and likely beyond. His many books continue to sell and the number of people whose lives have been changed by his writing expands each year.
In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw is feeling Barack Obama's pain in an article titled "Imagine the Tweets During the Cuban Missile Crisis." The pull quote was "The JFK who charmed the press would have had a harder time in today's media world."
Translation: JFK wouldn't have had as many eager myth-makers as he did. Brokaw despaired about how he was working on a JFK special while observing the shutdown -- "food fight, meltdown" -- between Republicans and Obama. He couldn't help but recall the good old days before New Media challenged liberal orthodoxy:
Longtime Los Angeles Times political reporter Robert Shogan died this week at 83. The Times appreciated him with the GOP consultant Mike Murphy's title "the Colombo of American political journalism."
The Washington Post obituary noted Shogan "leavened some of his books with accounts of newsroom irreverence that did not appear in the next day's paper." For example, this line about JFK:
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it seems a metaphysical certitude there are going to be some really absurd statements made by the liberal media concerning this tragedy.
I suggest none will be as preposterous as CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer actually claiming Sunday, “Nothing like this had ever happened” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
On Friday, NewsBusters had the privilege of being the first organization to interview New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter about her new book, “Never Trust a Liberal Over Three - Especially a Republican.”
What follows is the first part of the discussion (video follows with transcript):
Appearing on MSNBC's All In show on Wednesday, August 28, MSNBC's Chris Matthews called it a "great irony" that only two Republican Senators opposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an implicit suggestion that the modern GOP opposes voting rights.
The MSNBC host's observation came as he recounted that many Democratic politicians in the 1960s, including friends of President Kennedy, were segregationists. Matthews began:
Ever notice how Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and their divisive ideological brethren see anything and everything happening today through only one prism, that of race?
It's also how they view history, even when the specific event cited had nothing to do with it. (Audio after the jump)