I remember it well

Glenn Garvin describes the four days in November 1963 when the people of the United States were united by television:

Within moments of that first announcement on Dallas’ ABC affiliate WFAA — the reporter, Jay Watson, had dashed to the studio from the scene of the assassination a few blocks away, dragging witnesses along with him — America’s three broadcast television networks were, for the first time, dumping their regular programming for a breaking news story.

The soap operas, Westerns and quiz shows would not return until after Kennedy’s funeral, four days and $40 million in lost commercials later. By then, 175 million Americans had tuned in to the networks’ coverage for an average of 32 hours apiece.

Along with TV cameras, they had toured the sniper’s nest from which the shots were fired, seen the accused assassin arrested and then murdered, visited the rotunda where the president’s body lay in state, and burst into tears as his little boy saluted the flag-draped coffin. Newspapers churned out extra editions all weekend, but they were keepsakes, not news: We’d already seen it on television.

“That was the weekend that everything changed in American journalism,” says CBS Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer, recalling Kennedy’s assassination 43 years ago Wednesday. “Up until that weekend, most people got their news from print media — newspapers and magazines. From that weekend on, people turned to television.”

Yes indeedy. And for the first time they turned away from newspapers.

”How quickly TV took over!” says Ruth Ann Rugg, director of interpretation at Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the assassination-site center that earlier this year hosted an exhibit on reporting that day. “It was the first time that Americans were glued to their TV sets. What happened, what was going on with the suspect, [Lee Harvey] Oswald getting killed, the funeral procession — it was all right there on TV.”

Reporters didn’t necessarily realize that the entire paradigm of journalism was shifting around them –

You can say that again! And it wouldn’t be the last time, either.