Get it first, but get it right: What today's reporters can learn from the coverage of the John F Kennedy assassination

The expertise on 22 November 1963 of the largely unknown Merriman Smith and the television men Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather have undermined my theory and underpinned the basics of journalism that were right then and are right, and even more necessary, today.

When the three shots rang out at 12.30pm Dallas time Smith, an experienced White House agency reporter for United Press International (UPI) was in the press pool car following the presidential cortege. It was supplied by a telephone company who had added the novelty of a phone, unheard of in the early 1960s.

Smith, a grizzled 50-year-old newswire veteran, lived by the maxim “get it first, but get it right,” and within two minutes was on to his office with the terse one line that rattled off the tape machines at 60 words a minute. Around the world, editors heard five bells (to denote the priority of the story) ring out from the UPI machine: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”

Walter Cronkite was in the CBS office in New York. A former wire reporter himself, he knew Smith and was confident in what the UPI man was filing. Cronkite had taken television reporting to new heights but to break into the afternoon soaps on the basis of three shots and nothing more was a big decision to take even for a man who was not only the news anchorman but also the managing editor.

Cronkite went on air, but only audio for, laughable as it seems today, the only camera they had took more than 20 minutes to warm up. He did not embellish the single fact supplied by Smith but put it in the context of the presidential visit to Dallas and then waited for more news to come in.

Meanwhile in Dallas the press pool car was racing after the presidential open-topped limo that was heading towards the nearest hospital with Smith fighting off Jack Bell, the Associated Press (AP) reporter, who wanted the phone.

Over the course of the next 40 minutes Cronkite and every other television and radio editor was faced with the decision of what to put out. The president was dead, and then he was alive. In the course of that time Cronkite earned himself the label “the most trusted person in America.”

Clausewitz, the Prussian military analyst, devised the term “the fog of war”, meaning the inability to see through the haze of information that follows major battles. Cronkite cut through the fog of reporting.

Let’s fast forward 50 years and imagine what would happen now if a US president was assassinated during a routine trip. Now, as then, thousands would be thronging the streets, especially if the leader was as charismatic as JFK. Reporters and cameraman would be covering the event as part of the normal news cycle and ever since Kennedy as insurance… just in case.

There would be thousands of camera phones aimed at the car and maybe some news programmes would carry it live. But what happens when the three shots ring out? Thousands go on Twitter and within minutes it is tweeted millions of time across the world. Some will say they saw the president shot, others will say not, many will just not know but want to spread the word as fast as possible.

Newsrooms and websites will be engulfed in information and there will be people attempting to see through the fog. There will be the temptation by some, hopefully not by news reporters, to embellish, to big up their part in history.

Sky News has managed to get over the label “not wrong for long” which it carried in the first few months of its existence by disciplined reporting and editing, but no one mediates social media for fact except the medium itself.

Newsrooms use social media and crowd sourcing as tools and they are now major factors in news gathering but the facts have to be checked. Five thousand tweets say the president is dead; four thousand say he is alive.

Let’s get back to 22 November 1963. At 12.55pm reporters were told by a named Democratic politician that Kennedy was alive; 16 minutes later two Catholic priests said he was alive when they administered the last rites but was now dead.

Dan Rather, then the new kid on the block for CBS, also had a doctor saying the president was dead. He went in search of a telephone and found one in the bowels of the hospital and told his New York office at 1.19pm what he knew.

Cronkite, still on air, was careful to report that Dan Rather, the CBS correspondent, had been told Kennedy was dead and there was nothing official. He knew the value of accuracy and the cost of getting it wrong. It would be another 20 minutes before Cronkite went on air and said it had been officially confirmed that Kennedy was dead, and the three US networks were then on air for three nights and four days until the 35th president was buried at Arlington cemetery.

For those who want to know more about how the Kennedy assassination was covered, watch 'JFK: News of a Shooting' on More4 on 22 November, the anniversary of his murder. The programme is voiced by George Clooney, who directed the brilliant 'Good Night and Good Luck' about television journalism. Clooney’s father was a television reporter and seems to have passed on his enthusiasm to his son.

The programme highlights what has been the biggest change in reporting since JFK’s death: technology. Reporters in 1963 had no phones and they were literally fighting each other to get to a public phone booth. Some just barged into the hospital and took over the nurses’ and doctors’ phones. As one said: “You could have the biggest scoop in the world but not getting it out made it the biggest secret.”

The public’s perception of how they received news changed irrevocably that day. Television showed that newspapers could not keep up and 175m people in the US were watching by nightfall. Newspapers are still battling television as well as the new mediums. Gradually they are coming to terms with how to survive: content and accuracy and hopefully, over time, trust. Walter Cronkite would understand.

He and Dan Rather made stellar careers in television but what of Merriman Smith? Smitty won a Pulitzer for his reporting that day. The death of a president put him at the top of his profession. Seven years later, the death of his son in Vietnam caused him to blow his own brains out.

Chris Boffey is a former news editor of the Observer, Sunday Telegraph and the Mirror and onetime special adviser to the Labour government. 'JFK: News of a Shooting' will be shown on More4 at 9pm on 22 November.