on The Target Is
Destroyed. Certainly, one of the most ridiculous statements made
by Hersh would be music to Loomis' ears. Hersh's Holy Grail on
the assassination conspiracy, the cinching piece of the puzzle,
would be "a reel of tape of Oswald getting briefed by Giancana"
(Anson p. 120). With what serious people have learned about
Oswald today, through work by Phil Melanson, John Newman, and
John Armstrong, this is preposterous. The Blakey-Davis whim about
the Mafia hiring a "hit man" who couldn't hit the side of a barn
and used a $12.95 bolt action rifle to do the job, went out the
window when the HSCA closed down. But "crack" reporter Hersh
still buys into it. As he does the idea that Sirhan killed Bobby
Kennedy, proven by the fact that he wrote a blurb praising Dan
Moldea's 1995 whitewash of that case.

Behind all the sordid details of these articles there is a bigger
picture to be outlined. One of the main parts of it is the
increasing ascendancy of tabloid journalism into the major media
outlets, and with it, its concomitant attachment to the lives of
celebrities. More often than not, that translates into the
endless search for sleaze and scandal. This chain on the lives of
the Kennedys has been well described in these articles. The
overall tendency has become so prevalent that, as many have
noted, tabloid sales in the U.S. have declined of late because
the mainstream media have now bowed to these tendencies so much
that much of their news has seeped over, thereby blurring the
lines between the two. In my view, some of the milestones in this
trend have been examined in this article: in the nonfiction book
field it would be the Collier-Horowitz book; in magazine
journalism, the Kitty Kelley article on Exner; in television, the
1985 Rivera contr