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Originally Posted by turbonium
People all over town were listening to these commercial radio broadcasts, and the newsmen were passing along new police information as soon as they heard it over their police radios.
This is incorrect, and also has long been illegal. It is prohibited through federal and state laws. Section 705 of the Communications Act of 1934, since revised but retaining this law, addressed the issue....
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/h...1----000-.html
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Good work,
Turbonium--the law linked above is
not the Communications Act of 1934--rather, it is an entirely different law, which was first passed in
1968.
This is indicated in the notes, which you evidently didn't bother to read.
Here is the correct code section, 47 U.S.C. §605 (note that some sections of the original Act have been renumbered due to amendments and deletions). Note the words "interstate and foreign" in the first paragraph--this act does not apply to purely intra-state communications, which the Federal Government (theoretically) lacks the power to regulate. And I was unable to find any relevant laws in the Texas state code, using keyword searches for "police & radio" and "law enforcement & radio" on findlaw.com (which, by the way, I highly recommend for legal research). The FCC currently has the power to interpret §605 (see
here); how much the Commission used that power in 1963 is unclear to me at the moment.
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Radio stations have long made employees aware of these laws, with the strict rule... Do not report information obtained from police scanners. Certainly, the station can dispatch a news team to the scene, in an effort to get the first "breaking news" ahead of other media outlets....
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Actually, according to the FCC fact sheet I linked above, this would be illegal, technically, because the station would be deriving a benefit from the interception. Whether the Commission would actually sanction any news organization for this is another matter.
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The reasons for not making immediate public announcements of police radio communications are obvious - it can compromise the police in their efforts, aid the perpetrator(s), and cause chaos or panic among the general public. It can also cause other problems - since the information is not confirmed to be correct until police arrive at the scene to verify it. False or inaccurate reports called in to the police are common occurrences - someone may report a murder, a call will be dispatched over the police radio, and upon arrival the officers will find it was only a minor injury; or it could be just a house party full of loud, drunk kids, reported by an irritated neighbor who figured that would get a quick response.
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Possibly all of the radio and TV stations with scanners had policies about not reporting information over the air, for the very good reasons that you listed--however, those policies (or laws and regulations, if such actually existed at the time) could simply have been forgotten or ignored in the heat of the moment. Also, some or all of the news organizations in question could have decided to make an exception due to extraordinary circumstances. A report coming in
from a police unit would have been considered much more likely to have been accurate than a report coming
from the dispatcher, which, as you observed, could well have been prompted by a crank call. Bearing this in mind, and also bearing in mind that a news director might well have reasoned (correctly) that the police would
want the information about the murder and the suspect's description to be broadcast as quickly as possible, it is certainly reasonable to conclude that such a report
could have been broadcast, laws, regulations, and policies against doing so notwithstanding.
In any case, the mere existence of laws or policies generally prohibiting the reporting of information obtained from a police scanner does not prove that no such reporting occurred at the time. [edited to add: any more than laws against murder in Texas in 1963 prove that the murders of JFK, Officer Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald did not take place.]
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If you care to dispute this, please provide evidence that the Dallas radio stations at the time were actually reporting, over the air, incidents such as this, immediately after intercepting police radio communications via monitoring scanners.
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Unnecessary, as I have demonstrated above. The burden of proof is now on
you to show that such laws, regulations, or policies were in force in Dallas in 1963, and even then, as I have demonstrated, your so doing would not constitute positive proof that no such broadcast was made.
One final point--why are you even arguing over this? I've shown that it was perfectly possible, even without police scanners, that the report of the shooting and Oswald's description could have been broadcast within 15 minutes. Even if you win this argument, you've gained nothing, as you would still have to refute my assertions about a telephone call from police headquarters to the radio station, and, frankly, I don't see how you can do that.
[edit: typo]