This can't be good for our brains

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G'day, this is If You're Listening.

I'm Matt Bevan.

On the 11th of September, a couple of Thursdays ago, I was woken up at 10 past seven by a phone call.

It was a producer from ABC Radio asking if I could come on air and talk about the assassination.

I had been asleep, so I had to ask, bleary-eyed, what assassination?

Charlie Kirk had been assassinated, they told me.

That certainly woke me up.

They gave me an hour to figure out what was going on, but it didn't take that long.

Even before I could find my glasses, my wife Rachel gave me a quick pre-see on what had happened in Utah.

Within another minute, I had seen a video of it happening.

A close-range video.

If you were scrolling through X that day, you probably would have seen it too.

There was no avoiding it.

It was there from multiple angles.

This, to me, unfortunately, now feels kind of normal.

I've been woken up by similar phone calls multiple times over the last decade.

It's distressingly normal, in fact, for me to see someone murdered before I eat breakfast.

It might be something that you have experienced too.

It's probably not good for us.

In fact, there is a lot of research suggesting that it's definitely not good for us.

But I thought it was worth talking about this a bit.

This onslaught of horrific information that we wake up to every morning.

Because it hasn't always been

this way.

Cara Jensen-McKinnon is our supervising producer and she has been similarly neck deep in this world all week.

Hi, Cara.

Hello.

Yes.

You were up even before me that morning.

I was.

I feel like every psychologist you ever speak to about mental health says absolutely no phones in bed and absolutely no reading the news in the morning.

But for me, the first thing I do every single morning is scroll every push notification from the news.

And so at 5 a.m.

that day, I was awoken to news that Charlie Kirk had been shot and was in a critical condition.

And then moments later, another flurry of notifications basically saying that he had died.

From then, it was just profile after profile.

It was speculation.

You know, we had the director of the FBI, Cash Patel, literally live tweeting their investigation as it was unfolding, posting pictures of people to X, which felt novel.

Yeah, basically just a kind of whole slew of conspiracy theories that were really just starting to ramp up before we actually had a lot of information about what was unfolding on the ground.

It was extraordinary.

The speed at which documentary evidence of things happening was coming at us, but simultaneously

sort of random speculation and interpretations from people who claimed to be experts in various things, the number of people I saw saying this shot from this range had to have been a professional.

Yes.

When

Tyler Robinson is proven to be the guy, he is not a professional assassin.

He is a 22-year-old gun enthusiast.

You made a really interesting point while we were preparing our episode about this, which came out on Thursday, after I wrote in the stuff about Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

giving that incredibly powerful speech on the back of this truck.

And you made a really interesting point about it.

Yeah.

So, you know, Robert F.

Kennedy is standing on the back of this truck and he announces to a group of people who have collected there that Martin Luther King has been assassinated.

Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis.

And that was the first they'd heard about it.

You actually hear them kind of screaming and crying on tape.

And I just thought it's so novel, the idea of hearing information for the first time, perhaps hours after it's actually happened.

And to think that that was actually how people used to hear news, that they just have to be told by somebody because it wasn't on a little screen centimeters from their eyes at all given times.

Even the idea of, you know, TV news rolling TV coverage, which obviously existed before the internet, that is also a relatively new thing as well.

What you said reminded me of a story I wrote about quite a bit last year when the shooting of Donald Trump took place.

We didn't end up using this story at the time, but it feels even more relevant now.

It's about the Zapruder film, the clearest footage we have of the assassination of John F.

Kennedy in 1963, filmed by a man named Abraham Zapruder.

So I'll ask you first, Cara, when did you first see the Zapruder film?

I don't think I have actually seen it.

It's one of those things that's like in my mind's eye.

I've seen stills certainly from it, but I don't actually think I've seen the actual film at all now that I think about it.

Wow.

Which is crazy given how much I have seen on the internet.

It's one of the things that remains a mystery to me.

That's extraordinary because I saw it as a teenager.

Right.

You know, in the early days of the internet, this was just a video that people would share around in, you know, super low quality.mov file that would spread around the internet.

I probably saw it when I was 12 or 13.

Good.

Great.

Set you on the right path then, I could see.

It clearly did strange things to my brain.

I think it desensitized me to these things.

It was certainly the first video evidence that I had ever seen of a person literally dying, which is a horrifying thing to imagine showing to a 12 or 13-year-old, but there you go.

But also, it's sort of sat in my mind since then, these images that were captured by Abraham Zapruda that day.

And when I think about JFK, that's the first images that come into my head.

But for people who lived at that time and for people who lived in the the decades afterwards, that is not the case.

The Zapruder film really was not a well-circulated thing.

It was certainly something that people knew about, but it wasn't something that many people had seen up until our lifetime.

I've got this incredible story of how the Zapruda film came to be.

And it starts, obviously, that day with Abraham Zapruder standing on the side of Dealy Plaza.

He is holding his Super 8 camera, camera, an extremely home amateur film camera.

He had bought it quite recently and he was going to basically test it out.

He went down to see John F.

Kennedy's parade, his procession through the streets of Dallas, and he witnessed through the viewfinder of his camera the murder of John F.

Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald.

He captured 486 frames of eight millimeter tape.

So it is a six-foot-long strip of film.

Kennedy's car, with Kennedy having been shot, you know, drove off towards the hospital.

But Zapruder kind of lowered the camera and realised what he had captured.

And the story of what happened next is really incredible because how do you think you would react if you had filmed something like that, Carl?

I can't even imagine.

Again, it's like not a normal thing to be documenting things as it is now.

Yeah.

Probably I would call the police minute one if I had recorded something like that.

Say you recorded that now.

You would probably just hit upload, you know.

Fully.

As everyone does.

As everyone does.

Around the Charlie Kirk event, around the Trump shooting, around any dramatic news event.

The video is just uploaded to social media within minutes.

So obviously Zaprudo didn't have an upload button on his reel of film, but he really freaked out.

He took the camera with the film still inside he didn't take the film out back to his office he ran a sportswear business and he locked it in the safe totally freaking out about it yep on the way back he mentioned to a dallas morning news reporter that he knew that he thought that he'd filmed it

and the dallas morning news guy ran off and told the secret service and within a few minutes the police the secret service the Dallas Morning News, they were all there at Zapruder's office.

He had locked himself in his private office and was crying.

Eventually he sort of went, okay, well, obviously I need to provide the documentary evidence to the Secret Service,

because obviously that's very important information.

They went, well, look, the best option for developing this film, because it needs to be developed, is probably just to take it to the Dallas Morning News.

They will probably have some sort of equipment there that can develop it.

So he, with a police escort, goes to the Dallas Morning News.

They don't have any equipment that can develop it.

There is a TV station next door.

So he goes next door to the attached TV station to ask them if they have any equipment that can develop his film.

They scoop him directly onto live television.

Oh my God.

Without his film, but just to describe what had happened.

And we've got the audio of that here.

Okay.

A gentleman just walked in our studio that I am meeting for the first time as well as you.

This is WFA TV in Dallas, Texas.

May I have your name, please, sir?

My name is Abraham Zapruder.

Mr.

Zapruda?

Zapruda, yes, sir.

Zapruda.

And would you tell us your story, please, sir?

I got out

about a half hour earlier and getting into a good spot to shoot some pictures.

And as I was shooting, as the friend was coming down from Houston Street and making his turn,

it was about halfway down there.

I heard a shot.

Then he slumped to the side like this.

Then I heard another shot or two.

I couldn't say what it was, one or two.

And I saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything.

And I kept on shooting.

That's about all.

I'm just sick.

I can.

I think that pretty well expresses the entire feelings of the whole world.

You have the film in your camera.

Yes, I brought it on the studio.

We'll try to get that processed and have it as soon as possible.

It's my nightmare to be asked on live TV with no preparation time.

So I can't even imagine how he felt.

Well, yeah.

In a moment, I'm going to tell you about a literal nightmare nightmare that Zapruder had soon after this.

But they didn't have any equipment at the TV station either.

They eventually figured out they would have to go to the Kodak film plant, which was in Dallas.

And so the police took him there to the Kodak plant, where they obviously prioritized developing this particular piece of film as soon as possible.

So they developed the film into something that could be fed into a projector.

And then he, a number of the police, the Secret Service, one of his colleagues who'd come with him and a number of the Kodak employees went into a viewing room and became the first people to see

this film.

And we've got audio of the Kodak employees and Zapruder's colleague describing what that experience was like.

Have a listen.

So when that film came off the processing machine, Mr.

Zapruder was there.

And he and I, and probably about 15 in all, went in the projection room to see what he had on his film.

And he started out, as we were threading it up, apologizing that he really didn't know what was on the rest of the film, that he wasn't much of a photographer.

Then Zapruder's film came on, and number one, it was needle sharp.

Two, the color was beautiful.

The focus was locked in perfect.

On film was only, I believe, 22 seconds long.

And that last shot, you see his head come off.

And I I mean you could see it so clear.

I've seen all these replicas and all the copies, nothing like that first one.

All during the sequence of pictures of the movies, there's not a sound, not a sound except the projector.

And when the projector was turned off, it had to have been three, four, or five seconds.

like this, nothing, when one voice said, my God.

Wow.

I mean, again, at that time, it's the first time that you've ever seen a film of that nature.

I mean, we were saying at the beginning that this is the sort of thing that, unfortunately, we see on social media more often than we would like, but that's the first time you've ever seen anything like that.

Yes, they would never have seen anything like that.

So they

made copies of the original film, three copies.

There was then four versions of it, the original and three copies.

Zapruder gave two copies to the Secret Service and then took the third copy and his original back home.

And at that point, a bidding war started for the tape because of obviously the media was extremely interested in getting their hands on this.

And the bidding war was primarily between CBS News and Life magazine.

Obviously, magazines at the time were rather large businesses and could offer really large amounts of money and had cash to spare.

They had a lot of cash.

So, you know, the bidding war was going on, but Dan Rather, who was a CBS news correspondent, at the time he was the head of the Dallas newsroom,

he called up the CBS office, you know, the headquarters, told the news editor, there's this tape that, you know, this man Zapruda has, and, you know, there's this bidding war going on.

What do you want me to do?

And the news editor said, you should go to Zapruder's house, punch him out, take the tape, bring it here, and let the lawyers sort out whether we were allowed to do that or not.

So Dan Rather goes, okay.

He hangs up the phone.

The news editor says he kind of hung up the phone and he went, what have I done?

He manages to call back and he manages to get Dan Rather back on the phone and go, so don't do that.

Don't go and punch this this poor man and steal his film and so he didn't do that great but dan rather did go and ask to see the film and he watched the film cbs lost the bidding war and so cbs couldn't run it but dan rather described it just the camera on him describing it on tv

he actually made a number of mistakes because he was kind of describing it from memory oh my gosh and he described a number of things wrong about you know kennedy's head jerked this way it actually jerked the other way, that kind of thing, which is not the kind of thing that you want when it comes to events like this, you know, discrepancies in information, people start to think that there's something dodgy going on.

So in the end, Life magazine paid Zapruder $150,000

for the rights to publish his tape.

That's the equivalent of about $1.5 million now.

Shish.

Yeah.

That's a lot.

But Zapruder then got to sleep and had this nightmare he imagined himself in Times Square looking at a big billboard that said come and watch the president's head explode wow and he felt horrified by the idea that he was going to provide this horrifying image to the world

and so he told life magazine that they could have all of the frames except the one where the bullet hits the president's head, which is frame 313.

And so Life magazine went, okay, fine.

And they published in their magazine still images of 33 of the frames.

And the thing is, basically from then up until the 1990s, that was really the only place that people could see what had happened that day.

Right.

Was in these still images that were published in Life magazine.

Wow.

Imagine an event of the scale of the assassination of the president,

and you know there's video evidence of it, but nobody can watch it for 30 years.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine the conspiracy theories that are going to be born out of that.

I guess we do have an equivalent thing going on now that the U.S.

government isn't releasing enough information for people,

a certain man and certain files about that man.

I mean, it's fuel for the fire, really.

I mean, it was understandably difficult for them to maintain that because the story of what happens after this is, if anything, as extraordinary as the story of what happened up to this point.

Life magazine, one of the reporters, took photos of the photos with his camera.

Okay.

And he wanted to write a book about it.

And he knew that he wouldn't be allowed to...

use the photos because he didn't own the copyright to them.

He had sort of like an artist draw the pictures from his copies of a copy.

Oh my God.

You know,

Time Life, the corporation, sues him anyway.

Of course.

Yeah.

Why not?

And the thing is, they lose.

Oh.

They lose to him, and the court determines that it is in the public interest under fair use provisions

for

something historically significant like this to be shown.

And this is one of the precedents that sets the rules for all copyright law in the United States in terms of news outlets using copyrighted material for the purposes of telling the news.

Wow.

Amazing.

I know.

So the first time it's shown really anywhere is in a court case, which was kind of a bogus court case run in 1968, which was brought by a conspiracy theorist D.A.

from New Orleans.

In this court case, they bring the video and they show the video in the court case.

And while the video is sort of in the possession of the court, someone makes a bootleg copy of it.

And then this bootleg copy and copies of it begin sort of circulating around college campuses.

And people go, Oh, you know what?

Would be really cool.

I've got, you know, this copy of the thing.

We could watch it later.

I love that we've always been like this.

I know, I know.

We've always wanted to see little bad forbidden videos.

I know, it's a secret.

It's a special secret.

And it was, you know, a bad reproduction of it.

In 1975, Geraldo Rivera, the journalist who has had an extraordinarily strange career,

he got a copy of the video and showed it on television.

Wow.

It was shown once on TV.

There were all of these decency cases brought against him and all this stuff.

And it was never shown again on TV after 1975.

It wasn't seen again until the film JFK by Oliver Stone, starring Kevin Costa.

He paid the Zapruda family $85,000 for it.

Eventually, one of these copies makes its way onto the internet.

And so then, of course, from that stage in the 1990s, anybody who really wants to see it can go and find it.

The original copy has now been permanently taken into government custody at a court-mandated cost of $16 million to the Zapruders.

Geez, they really made quite a lot of money out of this

film.

They did, yeah.

And Zapruder himself never touched a camera again in his life.

Yeah.

Died in 1970, was kind of mortified by the entire thing, but his family have made a pretty significant profit from this incredibly significant historical but privately recorded film.

Yes.

And the amazing thing about it is, you know, this thing being secret for 30 years is obviously incredible.

But at the same time, footage of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot was broadcast live on TV the day that it happened.

Yes.

Because it happened in front of the TV cameras and it was broadcast over and over and over and it was incredibly familiar.

And so the images of Lee Harvey Oswald were sort of burned into the brain of people at the time,

but not the images of Kennedy.

And being kept a secret for all these years kind of

fueled all these conspiracy theories about it.

Obviously, there was a conspiracy that there was something being covered up because Zapruder had gone, you can't look at this frame.

Right.

There was one of the reproductions, two of the frames accidentally got swapped in order.

So it accidentally played frame 216, 217, 219, 218, 220, like that.

That was just a mistake that someone had made in the copying and people thought that was part of a cover-up conspiracy.

Yeah.

But it was this secret thing that had been kept from the public for so long.

And I guess the question is, you know, it's kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Exactly.

If you watch it straight away, then that's obviously terrible.

But also if you keep it a secret for 30 years, then people start to make assumptions about why you're keeping keeping that secret.

Exactly.

What was it like immersing yourself in the news of all the speculation from various sources about Charlie Kirk's shooter over the weekend and into this week?

It kind of feels like, weirdly, when you're reading this information as it's coming out in real time, that you're on the front line almost of just the news being made.

When the bullet casing stuff came out in particular, and seeing kind of all the articles that came out after that, it was like, as a person that spent an embarrassing amount of time in very sad and embarrassing parts of the internet, I knew all those references.

And you see people getting it wrong and kind of then people basing their opinions and conspiracy theories off the back of those sorts of ideas.

I think one in particular was the kind of Groper

stuff, which is a group of alt-right Christian white guys that follow Nick Fuentes.

Very, very, very right-wing, Very right-wing.

So right-wing that they actually talk about Charlie Kirk.

As being a centrist.

As being a centrist and being

insufficiently right-wing.

Exactly.

And that was kind of one of the initial allegations was that, you know, perhaps this guy was so right-wing that he had assassinated.

Charlie Kirk for being a centrist, for not being right enough.

And initially, the stories coming out were perhaps that MAGA was splintering and that it was just kind of all of these different groups that were not even cohesive anymore.

It was just a bunch of different people with a bunch of different ideologies.

And I think since then, that's been largely debunked.

And for the most part, Tyler was just a disenfranchised person who was whipped up into a frenzy as so many men in America are.

And he got access to a gun and decided to execute somebody, which is a terrible tragedy and also.

Far too common.

Exactly.

It was really extraordinary for me because, you know, I certainly spend a lot of time in unpleasant parts of the internet, but it's usually unpleasant Russian parts of the internet.

I didn't know what groipers were, and I heard all these references to groipers and all these people being unbelievably confident that Tyler Robinson was a groiper.

And so I started reading articles and I listened to an hour-long podcast on the weekend while doing the dishes.

I'm sorry.

Well, well, of these guys

who seemed so sure.

Oh, yeah.

They were so confident that these references, these things that were written on the bullets definitively and certainly meant that this guy must be a member of this Groper group.

They were so convincing.

And I can understand why people who kind of want to believe that

my side would never do anything like this.

It must have been the other side.

Would listen to those guys and believe what they were saying.

Yeah.

It's extraordinary how many people were so wrong about this.

Yeah.

And I think it is because people are looking for a very clear narrative to kind of explain away why somebody's done something.

But the reality of existing on the internet nowadays is that there's a just infinite images every day that you're looking at.

And you don't necessarily know where the images have come from.

But some of those, you know, originate in the very right-wing places on the internet.

Some of them originate in the very left-wing places of the internet.

But it's just this gross soup that we're all like floating in every day.

It was never going to be a clear story, I don't think, about who this person was.

No.

And we're now sort of seeing a situation where Trump and his supporters are sort of arguing, oh, well, this is just left-wing violence that comes from left-wing groups like Antifa, which...

doesn't seem to exist in any sort of organized capacity, but they're going to crack down on them, which is what we've seen with the campaign, the successful campaign to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off air.

Yeah, exactly.

i genuinely don't know what the solution is whether it's better to have the information available to you probably be better if it was more optional rather than just instantaneous you open up a website and then suddenly you're seeing someone get moved exactly yeah but having the information available or trying to avoid the nightmare that Abraham Zapruder had yeah yeah I don't like to think about what it's doing to our brains no something very bad no I can't imagine it's good we need one of those you know that flash light thing they had in Men in Black?

Yes, the neuraliser.

Yeah.

When am I going to get one of those in the eyes?

I just want one of those.

Wipe whatever's going on up here.

And I want to start again.

Yeah.

Imagine.

Cara, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Thursday's episode is all about the bizarre attacks by the US military on Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean.

Boats Boats which they say are trafficking drugs.

There have now been three attacks in as many weeks.

17 people have been killed on these boats.

And on the surface, it's hard to see exactly what the US is hoping to gain out of this in the long term.

But when you look at it in a historical context, it makes a lot more sense.

That's our episode coming out on Thursday.

And one more thing, we're putting together a Q ⁇ A episode.

So if you've got a question about something we've covered on the show or something else that's sort of in our area of expertise or even how we make the podcast, record us an audio message with your question and email it to if you're listening at abc.net.au.

You can also write it out and send it to us, but a recorded message would be even better.

If you're listening at abc.net.au.

Catch you later.