Black Weekend: A Reception History of Network Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

This article reconstructs how Americans processed their experience of the assassination, mourning period, and funeral of John F. Kennedy over a four-day period in November 1963 as fundamentally a television trauma. Using viewer mail sent to NBC news anchors in the midst of the Black Weekend, as well as some surveys and interviews conducted at the time by social scientists, the article argues for the centrality of television to the experience. It also explores how the relative newness of the television phenomenon required Americans to grapple with the uncanniness, as well as the anguish, of what they were going through. The letters show viewers highly conscious of the medium and of television news personnel as workers in an era before television news had become so routinized and conventionalized as to be taken for granted and invisible as a medium.