Case in point, another news story that circled the globe recently – and God only knows why. This one surrounds the 21-year-old claim that Secret Service agent George Hickey, riding in the car immediately behind the presidential limousine, accidentally shot Kennedy's head off when he grabbed an AR-15 automatic rifle to defend the chief executive.
The fact that this story ran – again – raises the question: Does the news media know about Wikipedia?
George Hickey, who died in 2009, sued St. Martin's Press in 1995 over the outrageous claims made in Bonar Menninger's 1992 book Mortal Error only to be told that he had waited too long after the book's initial publication to file against the publisher. Hickey later settled with St. Martin's Press, who apologized.
Now comes Aussie police detective Colin McLaren, whose revival of the Menninger tale will get airplay in November on cable channel ReelZ's "JFK-The Smoking Gun."
If the earlier Hickey lawsuit wasn't enough to dissuade the news media from treating this creaky story seriously, one only had to do a little research to find out that nine Secret Service agents were within a few feet of Hickey and all testified before the Warren Commission or gave statements about the day's event and yet not one of them said they saw or heard Hickey's AR-15 fired that day.
Indeed, author Bonar Menninger himself notes that Kennedy aide and close personal friend Dave Powers, riding in the car with Hickey, said, "Someone a foot away from me or two feet away from me couldn't fire the gun without me hearing it." [4]
All of these facts are easily accessible except, apparently, by world's news media.
We wonder if ReelZ will show the amateur film of the assassination made by Charles Bronson, which shows Hickey seated at the moment of the fatal head shot? Perhaps they'll be able to explain how Hickey was able to accidentally shoot Kennedy through the windshield of the Secret Service follow-up car without leaving a trace. Now that's a magic bullet!