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| President John F. Kennedy and Jackie in Dallas Nov. 22 50 years ago at Love Field as they fly in from Fort Worth. His assassination changed the direction of politics in America. (AP file photo) |
(reposted from Center on Social Minimalism)
CLEBURNE, TX--Probably one of the hardest lessons this old thick-headed, idealistic country boy from North Central Texas ever had to learn during the rush-to-riches melee of the Sunbelt Era was that the Free Press that’s so deeply embedded in our national psyche is a laughable joke. In a way.
Costly Sunbelt expansionism, fueled by corporate re-locations from northern states, and a frenzied rush to capitalize on new streams of advertising revenue it opened up, turned newspapers into the latest Bible Belt whores, you could even say. In a way.
I learned a hard lesson on how lobbying works on an earlier JFK anniversary edition once. While at the old, 10,000-circulation Cleburne Times-Review in the D-FW metroplex.
I had a scoop on a possible real killer, and was running with it. Until...Confronted with cutting out a key part of the story or losing my job over the threat of lost advertising revenue, I lowered my head and limped back to my desk. And scratched it out. I'm no match for a rush of dollars. Just ain't my style, thank you.
But newspapers aren't free, ma'am. Nope. Events this week, leading up the 50th anniversary, brought back memories. With Corporate America even more in control of our media, our Democracy's credibility (that fragile system of checks and balances that is our government) is strained, to say the least.
You've read many of the conspiracy theories, no doubt. Do I, personally, believe there were others involved? Most definitely. More than likely it was carried out by rogue C.I.A. agents, which is just one of many theories that have come up.
President Kennedy had just fired one agent, one story goes, one strongly connected to both Wall Street and the surging military-industrial complex. The president also had given orders to start pulling troops out of Vietnam, too. Bad news for spook financiers. Couple that with soreheads. Always a volatile mix.
Anyway, the assassination changed the direction of the country, one can easily argue. Vietnam mushroomed. The military-industrial complex mushroomed. The Sunbelt mushroomed. And so have the wars. Or conflicts. Here's a link to one such story (about the New York Times and C.I.A.); one about the actual coup, among others, can be found here.)
The story I was working on came at the 1978 JFK anniversary. Cleburne is located 30 miles south of Fort Worth and 45 miles southeast of Dallas. All the D-FW metroplex were transformed profoundly by the Sunbelt.
In media, old family newspapers were picked up by corporate chains rushing in to take advantage of the growth. Chains who then had to squeeze to come up with the revenue to pay off acquisition notes when economies soured.
But newsrooms, news operations – where the change hit the hardest, in my opinion -- are separate departments from newspaper advertising and circulation rooms, of course. With much different functions.
But since newspapers are a business, business activity must take priority over news operation. It's how you stay in business. That was the easier crunch newsrooms found themselves in. Acquisition debts. Almost like an odd man out.
Las Vegas-based Donrey Media Group had purchased the historic Cleburne paper a few years earlier at this time, and of course making money was the name of its game. The only game, it seemed at times. To us in the newsroom, especially.
I’d worked probably a week on this JFK story. It involved a shadowy European figure with a French Algiers connection, named Jean Souetre, who supposedly had been placed by several sources in Dallas at the time of the assassination.
A prominent Cleburne businessman, a day after JFK was killed, had gone to the FBI and reported an incident. Two nights before, he’d been at a Dallas nightclub and had overheard men at the next table, one of whom was identified as Souetre, discussing an assassination.
I learned of the reported story thru a leading JFK conspiracy theorist, J. Gary Shaw, an architect in Cleburne. Shaw showed me documents he’d obtained thru the Freedom of Information Act detailing the story by the Cleburne merchant.
The night before we were to publish it, I made “the mistake” of contacting the businessman at his home for a comment. It surprised him, yes. Got a little miffed.
After a while he told me flatly he didn’t want his name mentioned in anyway in any JFK story. Don't you do it, was the warning.
Well, that surprises me, I told him. You did what a good citizen should do and reported something out of the ordinary. You should be proud of yourself!
When you’re young and naïve, you think like this. Because he did his patriotic duty, people would honor him, I'd thought. This is America, after all! Our conversation ended that way. Differing on how people would feel.
But I have a job to do, I told him. The public has a right to know about your incident. I'm a reporter; I will put the story in the paper tomorrow on the anniversary of the shooting, and simply say you did not wish to comment on it.
I'm sorry you see things differently. And then I hung up.
People's misconception of a free press (extrapolated to free governmental services today, if you wish), begins and ends with who's going to pay for it. A reader pays a quarter, fifty cents, dollar or two, maybe, to purchase a single newspaper copy. And feels it gives him or her vested interest in content. Even without supporting advertisers.
And that hardly covers the mailing or distribution cost. Who pays for gathering the news and that advertisement information, and all the leg/hand work in composition, and in printing? And then to ensure delivery in what often is a complex distribution system? Huh?
We can now see there are similarities with this curmudgeon in how political services are delivered, do we dare say? Left stranded more and more by missing voters. We are exceptional. And we're embittered for being shafted, right?
The past 50 years of changes have lifted the veil on American dreamers -- those who still thumb-suck the concept of an American Exceptionalism! Two bits of idealism has been checkmated by six bits of financial realism, and lo and behold...Our vision has been altered. And we're sore about it?
Early the next morning after my interview, this new education began for me. A balding but youngish figure with a serious bent on his face appeared in the newsroom doorway, and looked straight back in the corner at me.
Don Schneider, general manager, then extended his left arm and beckoned me with his hand. Come to my office, it said. I followed and there on the plush sofa beside his desk was the businessman I interviewed by phone last night. And he wasn't smiling.
I’d been called upon the Golden Carpet, to see The Light of Day--of how things really work. To be given a sniff of the dark grease that kept the shiny wheels of virulent Sunbelt capitalism “a rolling along, sweet doggie, rolling right along.”
After awkwardly explaining my telephone call last night about the JFK story had raised some undue concern with “this gentleman,” Don then laid it on the table.
The man was threatening to yank his advertising -- $75,000 annually? $15,000? I can't remember the figure.
“Unless you can show conclusively that that guy (the one in my article) was the one who killed President Kennedy, then you’re not going to use this man’s name with him in the story,” Don more or less informed me. “Do you understand?"
Gulp.
Yup…Pieces all fell into place. I understood. Finally. Along with this man's proper concern.
Heated capitalism, first, had railroaded civic responsibility. Again. Along with what's now a lot of our other values, too, for sure. But it wasn't this guy's fault.
I suppose the debate is whether this still brand new baby of America has been retrofitted, or retrograded, back to the values of its European parents as it's aged some.
For in this example, inadvertently, I was risking putting the man and his business on the endangered list. All because of a web of regional mores sure to snare him. And we'd thought we'd made a cosmos jump?
Johnson County was a dry county. Changing some with the times, yes, but still grounded in old ways of morality. Indeed, the old saying before the Sunbelt clearly took over was that there were more churches in Cleburne then there were fillin’ stations.
This man’s concern was that he’d gotten caught admitting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he’d actually been sinning “over the county line” at a Dallas nightclub, where they sold WHISKEY!!
Lord help him! He’d been sippin’ of the devil’s brew just sure as hell! the story’s headlines might just as well have screamed. Caught in the act!
And I’d actually naively thought when telephoning him that’d the press had the power to get him hailed more or less as a hero. Not destroyed.
The killin’ of our nation’s president in Dallas was minor, indeed, compared to what he might've lost in sales to righteous folks who refused to shop in a store whose owner was a drinker!
Is this not -- shall we dare ask, too -- a tell-tale sign the nation had faltered and fell back into provincialism, that anachronistic stage of political existence we baby-boomers so fervently believed we'd arisen out of? Huh?
Or was that our dreamy mistake? We thought we were chosen and needn't dirty our hands with that education stage? Left it unattended?
So, what more can you say? But to say it: Money still talks and Talk still walks.
The advertiser had a rope tied to our general manager’s collar--a man directly responsible for keeping our newspaper’s financial ship afloat – and was holding it tight for a ransom payment. My story. Omit his involvement.
Aw, the power of a lobbyist! Life or death. Just one yank. Really, was my story worth anything? Other than a few extra newsstands sales? Don was being nice just going the extra step to explain it all to me.
I folded like a wet, limp accordion. “I'll leave him out of the story then.”
A great local angle on a national story, it could have been. But with a hot brand of capitalism transforming the Sunbelt, its threat to advertising dollars reduced it to something lower than page filler.
I got up and walked out of the office. Nodding my head at the floor.
A newly educated man.
-- 30 --
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