| 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 around a full investigation into the Kennedy assassination, one must turn to the theories of Political Correctness and Spiral of Silence. |
