originally published in the Dayton Daily News on July 20, 1999

OTHER VOICES

`JFK: THE SEQUEL’ NOW PLAYING AND PLAYING ON A TELEVISION NEAR YOU

By Amy Kunz

Fade out on the toothy protagonists flying off undetected into the sunset. They lived. They escaped the glaring limelight even if it lit them in a flattering light now and then.

They fled in the only way they knew how. They staged a crash and are sitting somewhere now on a secluded beach or on the porch of an abandoned bed and breakfast sipping mimosas and having a good laugh at all of this . . . stuff, at all of this coverage, all the regurgitated facts, all the file photos, all the hype of any big summer Hollywood money-maker.

At least I hope it ends that way.

Watching the network rundown of Saturday’s events was a little like watching a slick blockbuster in slow motion. Talk about the trend of making longer features these days. In fact, this one beat out the longest. All afternoon long and with almost no commercial breaks, the networks rehashed the little information they had into hour after hour of exhaustive coverage that was, well, exhausting.

Each network showed some restraint in waiting all of six hours or so before they put their own tagline on their version of the grim events. Using tidy graphics and superimposed images of our heroes and their famous family, news teams crafted the final touch to their packages. NBC went the straightforward, somewhat bland route with “The Search for John F. Kennedy Jr.” CBS boldly got ahead of itself with “An American Tragedy” and ABC, who stuck it out the longest, logging the most uninterrupted hours of regurgitation – Peter Jennings even looked squeamish after a while – won with the eerie, boding “A Nation Waits.”

I had been told how the same phenomenon happened for a whole week when Princess Diana exited the strange stage of a public life. I learned about her death in a succinct, somber blurb in a Central American newspaper. I missed the spectacle that went on “up here,” and I do not feel the lesser for it. I am not too young to remember when things like this were handled in periodic updates and occasional break-ins for actual developments.

How much do we need to know when things like this happen? How many times can we hear reporters rehash and reword the same details over and over again or, worse yet, speculate endlessly on aspects of the story when they are in no position to do so?

These lives are nothing to be made light of. These people do not belong to us. These stories are not fodder to fatten up network ratings. This is not a glossy summer blockbuster.

But I am still hoping for that happy ending.