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events as validating their coverage of the murder and their own reportage – even though
there were many problems with their coverage of the assassination. Zelizer writes,
“Journalists’ ability to create narrative patterns shaped the assassination into a
recognizable news tale, allowing them to reassert through narrative the control they had
lost in coverage.” The news media, in Zelizer’s view, exhibited a strong territorial
instinct in protecting their professional “turf” (the Kennedy assassination) from all
interlopers, such as the independent Warren Commission critics, historians, and
especially film directors in Hollywood. Zelizer writes that Oliver Stone’s controversial
movie about the assassination, JFK, “contested the journalistic authority their [the news
media’s] versions imply.” 18
This dissertation agrees with Zelizer and Simon in seeing American culture as an
arena in which the government, historians, journalists, and artists have struggled over
who has the authority to answer the question, who killed JFK? Similarly, in her study
Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken described “cultural memory” as “a field of cultural
negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history.” 19 Certainly, the
Kennedy assassination has been a field of “cultural negotiation,” with the different
versions of Oswald’s life and his guilt or innocence the subject of controversy and
contention. Sturken herself studied the history of the Zapruder film of the assassination,
and stated, “The instant captured in this film is historicized as the moment when the
18
Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the
Shaping of Collective Memory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 197, 213.
19
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the
Politics of Remembering, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1.
14