NewsBuster is a media watchdog that styles itself as "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias." It runs as a kind of blog of the Media Research Center (MRC), founded in 1987 by American conservative writer and activist Leo Brent Bozell III, and based in Reston, Virginia. Bozell was the nephew of the late conservative columnist and TV personality William Buckley. Before starting the MRC, Bozell ran the Conservative Political Action Conference.
This MRC blog is having a good time amidst the mainstream media meltdown as Robert Mueller’s Russia Gate probe was completed without any evidence of Trump-Putin collusion during the 2016 elections. One of its contributing writers, Jeffrey Lord, has branded the reaction of MSM against Attorney General William Bar as “grassy knoll media attack,” after Barr added to the no collusion finding that there had indeed been spying on the Trump campaign.
According to Lord, “grassy knoll” was once upon a time an American slang reference to the “conspiracy theorists” who argued that President John F. Kennedy was not killed by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, but by “assassin or assassins firing from the grassy knoll” in Dealey Plaza. Adding insult to injury, Lord asserted that the Warren Commission “concluded otherwise as there was no proof, but this didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists.”
Ever after, Lord pointed out, “grassy knoll” became a part of the American vernacular indicating that someone was a bit of a wacko, and a theorist of whatever was just a nutty conspiracy. He seems unaware of the fact that the Warren Report only got one thing right, as Jim DiEugenio remarked in his introduction to the series on its 50th Anniversary, namely that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And that was because the occurrence was captured live on TV.
In contrast to Lord, most Americans refuse to swallow the Warren Commission’s pill since the very day of the killing, as Gallup has been tracking decade after decade. Nonetheless, questioning the lone gunman hypothesis has become ingrained in the American culture not as a matter of opinion, but as a simple examination of the evidence.
Witness Accounts
Literally hundreds of people witnessed the shooting at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. The Warren Commission failed to do any rigorous and systematic analysis of their accounts. Nor did it lend any credence to those who said the shots came from the grassy knoll. A survey by History Matters found that 52 witnesses placed the source of the shots there, 48 at the Texas School Books Depository (TSBD), 5 in both locations, 4 elsewhere and 37 couldn’t tell. But most of all, 21 witnesses with crime scene training —from Secret Service men to Dallas Police officers— said their reaction to the gunfire was to go search the grassy knoll. The Warren Commission ignored all their testimonies and reported there was “no evidence” of a shot from there.
Forensic Analysis
Instead of focusing on the X-rays and photographs, the Warren Commission also admitted into evidence a drawing that did not accurately depict Kennedy's head wounds. The Zapruder film contradicts the drawing, which has Kennedy leaning forward in a wrong position and the path of the bullet through the head wounds descending from back to front, as it would have been fired from the TSBD. The Zapruder film’ s frame before the fatal shot shows Kennedy in the right position and so the path of the bullet clearly rises from back to front.
Thusly, Lord faces the devastating dilemma of all the advocates of the Warren Commission. If the drawing accurately represents Kennedy’s head wounds, then the Zapruder film was altered, hence conspiracy, hence cover-up. On the contrary, if the Zapruder film is authentic, then the drawing is a false representation, hence conspiracy, hence cover-up.
A Homeopathic Approach
Ironically, Lord fell into the delicate position of taking the grassy knoll reference with a blatant bias in a blog expressly devoted to expose and to combat bias.
The grassy knoll is linked neither to a wacko, nor to a nutty conspiracy theory, but to the conspiracy fact proven (and overlooked by both the U.S. government and the MSM) by mere observation of the Zapruder film: a shot from the front entered at Kennedy’s right temple and blew out his right occipital, followed by instant back spatter and a back and to the left movement like a billiard-shot response in accordance to the basic laws of physics.
Conspiracy and cover-up in the JFK assassination are not theoretical questions, but findings derived from serious research. What we have with Mr. Lord is a right-hand-thread wingnut trying to tighten the MSM —due to their bias on Attorney General Barr— by distorting the actual meaning of the grassy knoll in modern U.S. history, which is the claim of transparency and facts in the JFK assassination, as Lord himself is supposedly doing regarding the Trump-Russia collusion.
Addendum
It should be noted that in the matter of the JFK murder, left at times meets right. Michelle Goldberg has written for Salon, The Nation and The American Prospect. On April 19, 2019, Goldberg wrote an editorial for the New York Times about the Mueller Report. She wrote that she had desperately hoped for clarity,
….a rough public consensus on what had happened in the 2016 election and its aftermath, akin to the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John Kennedy….A set of facts that serious people could agree on, leaving conspiracy theories at least somewhat marginalized.
Please observe that whereas Lord praises the Mueller Report for his political agenda of exonerating President Trump, Goldberg praises it for her agenda of impeaching Trump. Which makes their mutual reference to the Warren Report even sillier. Especially with both writers holding up the report as a model of clarity capable of dispelling rumors or countering other renditions of the crime. Goldberg is even more humorous when she writes that the report presented “a set of facts that serious people could agree on”. This is the last thing the report does.
