Hasta La Creative!

The media-industrial complex loves nothing so much as an anniversary — especially a grim anniversary. Considering that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is an event that not only radically transformed our nation but the media itself, it’s no surprise that the 50th anniversary of that tragic day (Nov. 22, 1963) has cranked up the existing, ongoing media cottage industry surrounding JFK to a new level of frenzy.

In a single day last week I experienced nine (I kept count) exposures to JFK-related media products — from promos for the flood of TV specials airing all month (including National Geographic’s “Killing Kennedy,” a dramatization of Bill O’Reilly’s book starring Rob Lowe as JFK) to one-off print specials (my local newsstand in Manhattan is selling an exact replica of the Nov. 23, 1963 Dallas Morning News with its “KENNEDY SLAIN ON DALLAS STREET” headline) to a copy of “The Day Kennedy Died” (a newly published Life-magazine-branded compilation book) in a Barnes & Noble window. If I’d actually walked in to the bookstore, I probably could have easily doubled my count; as New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson wrote in a recent front-cover New York Times Book Review essay, “An estimated 40,000 books about [JFK] have been published since his death, and this anniversary year has loosed another vast outpouring.”

But the ultimate media-about-media-about-JFK experience I’ve had so far was during a recent trip to Washington, D.C.’s Newseum, the superb museum of news and journalism whose $450 million landmark building on Pennsylvania Avenue turned 5 years old this spring.

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