(20:15)

     “A team of experts assembled by the Discovery Channel has recreated the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  Using modern blood spatter analysis, new artificial human body surrogates, and 3-D computer simulations, the team determined that the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was the most likely origin of the shot that killed the 35th president of the United States.

     “The question we were trying to answer is, given the spatter evidence in a vehicle, and knowing an individual was sitting at a particular location, is there something we could use to determine where the shot originated?’ said Steve Schliebe, a blood spatter and trace evidence specialist with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, who was part of the special investigation.

     “While blood spatter analysis existed in the 1960s, modern innovations have greatly improved its accuracy and the amount of information that can be gleaned from drops of blood.”

     from:  MSNBC     2008 

     The above is simply another speck of conspiracy theory minutia during the 50 years since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination.  But maybe the least considered ‘conspiracies’ of all are the growing production machinations within news making itself, which knowingly take place inside every TV studio and control room every day.  Why do so few media conspiracists investigate news production?  My guess is because production effects are still considered to be posterior in importance when examining broadcast media.  Here, I contend that presentation elicits a primary affect upon news content reception.  It is a contention often rebuked.

     The conspiracy I am interested in here is not JFK’s assassination, but the disruptive manipulations of contemporary TV news: the incessant branding, the invasive ”shock” interviews, the incongruous “breaking news” urgencies we simply take for granted in today’s news broadcasting.  And so, this video asks:

    How might ‘breaking’ news coverage have looked --and would it have been received differently-- if in 1963 it had been produced in ways familiar to us fifty years later?

     The original 1963 broadcast, of course, included none of the production values I have layered here: the teletext, the animated graphics, the audio stingers, the logos, time stamps, stock market ticker, abrupt cut-aways, etc.  I’ve added these truly extraneous production ‘sweeteners’, because each is commonplace on today’s news screens. 

     Of course, all my added manipulations look rather clumsy since I have no access to high-end editing tricks.  (I only use an old version of iMovie to construct all my video projects.)  But I do so here to question if this tragic event might have been received differently if it had been aired with today’s presentational (in)sensitivities simultaneously splattered like brain-matter across our screens...and across the faces of those most traumatized by so-called TV journalism.