In order to pull all of our proposed topics together under sensationalism, as we discussed, I thought I would firstly tie them all together, just so I could see it written down:
~Religion: it was a big deal that Kennedy was a Catholic, a hot topic of debate at the time, comparison to candidate in the 20s, more press coverage because of this?
~Polls: what do the polls show us about how Americans feel about their leader during uncertain times?
~Assassination/Personal life: emerging media culture, seen widely on television, sensationalist true crime story that played out in front of the world, the idea of conspiracy keeping it sensational even today, because the death was such a big deal- we make Kennedy a bigger deal, losing someone young in the public eye
~Children’s book: the kid’s book seemed to make everything a big deal (the lifejacket story)- but still more evenly biased than older children’s texts, comparing the stories to Weems’ cherry tree story, did people like Weems make their tales ‘sensational’
I think we’ve really got a good connecting topic here with the sensationalism.
We can talk about how much of JFK’s memory today is still based in the fact that all the things we remember about him are these huge moments in history, like the Cuban Missile Crisis and his assassination, but when it came down to it, he didn’t really get that much done while he was in office. He set the foundation for a lot of things to come, but he didn’t get much legislation passed. Comparatively, Woodrow Wilson did a lot in his time in office, and he’s remembered just as highly, but, as we learned this week, he has this whole dark background that students often don’t learn.
I just noticed where Laura mentioned in her last post about not allowing discussion of J. F. Kennedy’s death to overlap with previous discussions on Crockett’s, but I thought they might make for an interesting comparison, considering we know so little about Crockett’s death and so much about Kennedy’s. Maybe too much, which is what leads to all these conspiracies. And people are so willing to look at everyone’s faults in the Kennedy administration so that they might find the culprit, but people jumped up to defend Davy Crockett when it seemed he might not have died the honorable death everyone had assumed. Does that say something about how much more “legendary” one might be than the other? Just a thought that jumped into my head.