Did you notice that ABC called its coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which includes those candid audio recordings from early 1964, an ABC News exclusive? But NBC aired portions of the tapes starting on Friday:
A spokesperson for Hyperion said the company reached out to NBC News: “We made NBC aware of the copyright and ABC News’ exclusive rights to that material and we urged NBC to respect those rights. We are confident that viewers who wanted the most in-depth coverage of the audiotapes, along with exclusive interviews with Caroline Kennedy and other exclusive material, are turning to ABC News.”
Portions of Sawyer’s exclusive interview with Caroline Kennedy aired last Friday on World News. But ABC News did not air any of the audio until Monday’s Good Morning America.
The release date for the book is Wednesday, Sept. 14. But it’s not unusual for booksellers to start selling particularly sought after titles before the official publication date. What is unusual about this particular book is it comes with extensive – and copyrighted – audio. But NBC News could use some of that audio under the auspices of fair use. What they couldn’t do, is craft their own two-hour special.
Meanwhile, does anyone know the real story of why Caroline Kennedy made those tapes public? I remember the tawdry run-up and see some say it’s a deal struck to stop a miniseries. A look back at the New Yorker profile that appeared at the time of her quixotic senate bid suggests Caroline’s not so private as we might think:
[W]hereas her mother liked to keep her family out of the public eye altogether, insofar as that was possible, with Caroline Kennedy the issue seems to be not so much privacy as control. She is happy to reprint family photographs in her books and sell off intimate family artifacts, as long as she is in charge of the process. She organized two auctions of Kennedy memorabilia, in which she sold family letters, old toys, and bric-a-brac from the family homes. The two auctions brought in about forty million dollars. (“Only the Kennedys could hold a garage sale at Sotheby’s,” Alan Jellinek, a London art dealer, commented, about the second auction. “It was just a collection of old junk. . . . She sold everything but her mother’s bloomers.”) A few years ago, she permitted the licensing of her mother’s jewelry collection to a company that sold cheap replicas of the pieces, the Jacqueline Kennedy Collection, on QVC.
Caroline Kennedy, it seems, is less private in the sense of secretive than private in the peculiar legal sense that the word has taken on, and that she has written about. For the Supreme Court, “privacy” implies control over one’s body and its use (the right to marry a person of any race, to use contraception, to abort a first-term fetus); for Caroline Kennedy, control over her body and its use encompasses photographs taken, descriptions written, and habiliments abandoned. “Whether it be the disclosure of intimate details about a person’s life or interference with private decisions,” she wrote, with Alderman, in “The Right to Privacy,” “there is a growing sense that all of us, well known and unknown, are losing control.”