" Lost in the Master's Mansion": How the Mainstream Media Have
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“Lost in the Master’s Mansion”: How the Mainstream Media Have Marginalized Alternative Theories of the JFK Assassination A dissertation presented to the faculty of the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Jim DeBrosse August 2014 © 2014 Jim DeBrosse. All Rights Reserved. This dissertation titled “Lost in the Master’s Mansion”: How the Mainstream Media Marginalized Alternative Theories of the JFK Assassination by JIM DEBROSSE has been approved for the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism and the Scripps College of Communication by Michael S. Sweeney Professor of Journalism Scott Titsworth Dean, Scripps College of Communication ii Abstract DEBROSSE, JIM, Ph.D., August 2014, Mass Communication-Journalism “Lost in the Master’s Mansion”: How the Mainstream Media Have Marginalized Alternative Theories of the JFK Assassination Director of Dissertation: Michael S. Sweeney Despite growing evidence to the contrary over the last fifty years, the mainstream media in America have stubbornly clung to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and was himself murdered there two days later by Jack Ruby, who also was acting alone. This dissertation examines the patchwork of misleading, suspect and narrowly selected evidence that supports the Warren Report’s theory and then documents via content and textual analyses and in-depth telephone interviews how the mainstream media have marginalized and at times ridiculed critics of the lone gunman theory in book reviews, newspaper columns, magazine articles, TV news broadcasts, and the selection of books for publication. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of the Mass Media helps explain why the mainstream media, especially its elite newspapers and news magazines, have failed for a half century to delve more deeply into the full range of evidence and connections that appear to underlie a conspiracy in what has been called The Crime of the Century. But the model falls short of explaining why both the media and nearly everyone in the JFK research community have failed to examine the broadest possible set of connections that may include the complicity of the French secret army (OAS), Israeli leaders and the Mossad. To understand “the firewall” that has been built iii around a full investigation into the Kennedy assassination, one must turn to the theories of Political Correctness and Spiral of Silence. iv Dedication To the memory of my loving parents, Ira J. and Charline M. DeBrosse, whose thirst for knowledge was limited only by their opportunities. v Acknowledgments Foremost among those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude is Mike Sweeney, my graduate school advisor and chair of my doctoral committee, whose unfailing guidance and unflinching open-mindedness made this dissertation possible. My former newspaper colleague and dear friend, Mary McCarty, inspired me to tackle the issue of media mistreatment of JFK conspiracy theories. And my good friends in time of need, Felix Winternitz and Lawson Wulsin, provided assistance as second and third coders. I also thank the members of my committee: Aimee Edmondson, Katherine Jellison and Roger Cooper. Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Kathryn DeBrosse, who provided the love and support to see me through this challenging period. vi Table of Contents Page Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iii Dedication .......................................................................................................................v Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................... vi Introduction: "Something Stinks about the Whole Affair" ................................................8 Chapter 1: A Nation Still Divided .................................................................................. 28 Chapter 2: Marginalizing the "Conspiracy Buffs" .......................................................... 61 Chapter 3: Consensus through Propaganda and Fear ...................................................... 90 Chapter 4: The Lens Is Everything ............................................................................... 115 Chapter 5: The Firewall ............................................................................................... 153 Chapter 6: Lost in the Master's Mansion ...................................................................... 180 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 191 Articles .................................................................................................................... 191 Books and Public Documents .................................................................................. 196 Electronic Media ..................................................................................................... 203 Oral Histories .......................................................................................................... 206 Appendix A: Library of Congress Book Selection ....................................................... 207 Results of Library of Congress Search ..................................................................... 207 Appendix B: Content Analysis Coding Sheet ............................................................... 216 Coders ..................................................................................................................... 217 Coding Results ........................................................................................................ 217 Intercoder Results .................................................................................................... 219 Intercoder Reliability Scores .................................................................................... 220 Appendix C: Publisher Information ............................................................................. 222 Appendix D: News Magazine Coverage ...................................................................... 227 Appendix E: TV News Coverage ................................................................................. 228 vii Introduction: "Something Stinks about the Whole Affair" I was eleven years that fall and sitting at home around our black-and-white Magnavox TV with some (I cannot recall exactly how many) of my five older siblings. Still grieving over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy two days before, we were watching a memorial service to the slain president when NBC News broke into the broadcast to play a videotape taken just minutes before of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. It was close to 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 24, 1963. While I was still trying to make sense of what I had just seen on our small, box-like console, my brother Dick ran out of the house and up the street to deliver the news to my parents, who were walking home from Mass at St. Mary Church in Dayton, Ohio. It is hard now to separate what I first saw on our living room TV from the now- iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photo—Oswald's contorted face and hunched body a fraction of a second after Ruby had thrust his revolver toward Oswald's gut and fired. What I mostly remember was the sound of the gunshot (more of a firecracker pop than the echoey sounds of my favorite Westerns) and then sheer chaos—men shouting, forms grappling, the camera view jiggling—until Ruby was pinned to the floor and the newscaster could report what had, incredibly, just happened. Even at so young an age I realized I had witnessed a terrible moment in history and I wished my older brother had stayed to make it both real and understandable to me. I knew at a primal level this was unlike the countless staged shootings I had watched on TV and in the movies, and I wondered with an aching wince what it must feel like to be shot in the stomach at such close range. 8 Eleven-year-olds typically do not think in terms of conspiracies, but my father— an intelligent, working-class man with a deep cynicism born of life's disappointments— certainly did. He saw in the execution-style murder all the signs of a cover-up and would continue to insist it was so long after the Warren Commission issued its report nine months later that both Oswald and Ruby had acted as lone psychotic killers. Did my father's views influence my own? Certainly, they must have at some level. But within weeks after the televised murder—and the far more traumatic shock of the assassination and burial of a president our Catholic community had nearly canonized—my adolescent life returned to the normalcy of school, sports, television, and comic books. I had no inkling until decades later that Ruby had been convicted and sentenced to death for Oswald's murder and that the decision had been reversed on appeal. Ruby died of cancer before going to trial a second time. Likewise, for the country as a whole, it did not take long for the memory of JFK's assassination to be lost in the maelstrom of racial strife, a deeply divisive war in Vietnam, and the murder of two more of the nation's heroes—Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Two years after the assassination of RFK, I entered college in 1970, soon to be caught up in the sexual revolution, the trappings of the counterculture