Old Evening News broadcast

[SteveGavazzi]

Axl wrote:

Ah, yes... Eddie Barker.  He nicely deflects the question about Dan Rather in that interview given that he actually had Dan thrown out of his station during the assassination coverage, but that's a story unto itself.

Okay, you can't just toss that out and then move on.  I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I want to hear this!

[Axl]

Sorry, Steve... I was afraid I was getting too far off-topic.  Besides, always keep 'em wanting more, right?  

Rather was the CBS Southern Bureau chief at the time, and they were using KRLD as their base of operations for the presidential visit.  A day or two after the assassination, Dan was looking into rumors (repeated to this day) that a group of Dallas schoolchildren had "cheered" when they were told that the president was dead.  As Barker noted in the interview TVC linked, the line being pushed by many national and international reporters at the time was that Dallas was a right-wing hellhole that had collectively "killed" Kennedy.

Dan passed the story on to Barker, who looked into it and determined there was nothing to it... at most, a few young kids were happy that they were getting a day off from school and didn't really understand what was going on.  To make a long story short, Dan did the story anyway, and Eddie was so furious he threw the entire CBS News staff out of the building.

After about a day, facing the threat of losing their affiliation and the fact that the CBS guys (by Rather's own admission years later) had stolen quite a bit of their footage on the way out, KRLD let them come back.  Still, I have a tape of a roundtable discussion with the KRLD guys taped a few years ago, and they literally applauded Eddie at the memory of him throwing out Dan Rather.  

[TVC]

The Kennedy assassination happened at a time when many CBS affiliates in the South, especially Texas, complained bitterly and often to the Network about the News Division's coverage of civil rights issues. It is not surprising that the Dallas affiliate resented "one of them northern boys" treading on their turf. The irony, of course, is that Dan Rather is from Texas.

[COINBOYNYC]

TVC wrote:
The video that most people associate with the shooting of Lee Oswald came from the camera of NBC affiliate WBAP-TV.

From a "primitive technology" aspect, one of the most fascinating parts of that footage is how the camera went from a wide shot to a close-up... the cameraman had to turn a dial or a knob to switch, instead of just zooming in (is it reasonable to presume TV news cameras back then didn't have that function?)... and the switch from wide to tight occured just a few seconds before Oswald was shot.

Imagine if the cameraman had waited those few seconds before going for the close-up...

[TVC]

Through the mid-1960s, studio camera designs tended to use turret lens assemblies. Lenses of various fixed focal lengths could be attached to the turret. The idea behind this is that a fixed focal length lens provides a better image than a Zoomar ("zoom") lens of variable focal length.

Some cameras were equipped with three fixed focal length lenses (wide, medium and close-up) and one zoom lens for flexibility. But as optics technology improved, studio cameras were designed to use only a single zoom lens -- either one that is integral to the camera and enclosed in a shroud, or is attached separately to the camera body.

Want a fun way to consume a couple hours of your valuable time? Check out the RCA studio cameras on this web site.

[Axl]

Gary Dunaier wrote:
...and the switch from wide to tight occured just a few seconds before Oswald was shot.

Imagine if the cameraman had waited those few seconds before going for the close-up...

Actually, the "turret" takes place as Ruby lunges, and the video returns at literally the exact moment he pulls the trigger.  I've even heard some extremely weak conspiracy theories on that (they were trying to hide the truth!) from people who obviously don't know anything about cameras, aren't aware that the CBS/KRLD coverage never turrets, and that there is plenty of extant film footage from other sources showing the whole thing.