The world is about to reel in shock when TV and radio stations make the news public. People in the streets will cry, Wall Street will shut down the New York Stock Exchange at 2:07 PM EST. For the next three days, and CBS, ABC, and NBC will cancel all commercials until Tuesday of the next week.
One more thing-- some schools dismissed the students for the day. And for those teachers, students, and parents in one particular school, in addition to the assassination, it would be a day they would never forget, all because of Dan Rather.
In Dallas, thirty-two year-old CBS news correspondent Dan Rather is reporting the events that are unfolding. One of the stories Rather is reporting to the nation is that when the principal of the University Park Elementary School in Dallas made the announcement over the loudspeaker that the President was dead, the children cheered.
Cheered? What kind of a city was Dallas where kids cheerrd the murder of a President? What was wrong with those people?
There was nothing wrong with those people, but there was something wrong with Dan Rather: the story wasn't true and he knew it. Eddie Barker, the news director of radio and TV CBS affiliates in Dallas had been approached by a liberal Methodist minister with the same story earlier in the day. Barker had three children in the school and contacted the principal and some of the teachers for verification.Each one adamantly denied it.
What had actually happened was that the principal, upon hearing the news of the shooting, dismissed the students at 12:30 without telling them why. (At 12:30, no one knew that the President was dead. The announcement of the President's death wasn't made to the nation until after 1 PM.) What the children were cheering was an announcement that school was being dismissed for the day. They had no idea why; their parents could tell them.
When Barker refused to report the minister's second-hand information, the pastor had gone to Rather with the story and Mr. Rather went to Eddie Barker who told him, "My kids are in school there, and I checked it out, and there's nothing to it,'"
"Well, great--I'll just forget it,' Rather said. Later Barker said, "But instead of forgetting it, he went out and did a number on Dallas and its conservatism, with the preacher's story at the center of his report."
The way Rather did it was to sidestep the customary process of filming such a report and having the news director look at it, evaluate it, and he would decide whether or not to air it. Instead, Rather made the announcement live on the air.
Did the story of the monstrous, cheering school children take hold? Yes, the story is still in the public consciousness more than 50 years later and is included in the book, "Dallas 1963" as something that was "rumored," but the authors didn't go on to say that the story was false. Either they didn't check it out, as reputable authors would do, or they did, knew it was false, yet left it hanging.
"Barker's local TV and radio crews scrambled to arrange on-air interviews with teachers to rebut the story, but the lie had already traveled halfway around the world and would become an enduring part of JFK assassination lore." (Philip Chalk, member of the University Park Elementary class of 1974)
Livid at being lied to, Barker laid into Rather as soon as he returned to the newsroom, expelling the reporter and all his national-news colleagues from the building, yelling, "Get out of here--you and this whole bunch!"
This shows us something about the human race: we can know that something is a lie, yet repeat it and even broadcast it to the world if it advances our agenda. Satan was the first to do this--he knew that Adam and Eve wouldn't become gods if they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but he told them they would. He told the lie because it fit his purposes and so the Bible says of this "angel of light" that he was a liar from the beginning.
If that weren't serious enough, another of his lies is that all religions lead to God. He knows that's not true, but millions and millions of people believe it. Why? Because they want to. That's another thing about homo sapiens: if we like a story, we'll believe it without giving it a fact check.
Satan knows that faith alone in Christ alone is what saves a person (Luke 8:12), but he promotes the lie that works do. Millions of people believe that lie. Why? Because they want to.
In order to make conservative Dallas look evil, Rather used a lie about elementary school children to do so because the lie fit the narrative he wanted to present.
How about us? Do we stick with the truth about those with whom we disagree or do we exaggerate their faults, shade the stories we tell about them to make them appear worse, or, heaven forbid, do we propagate rumors about them?
The New Testament says, "Speak the truth and speak it in love."
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