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It’s March 30, 1981, and I’m in the backyard with my father, spending the spring break holiday on his goal of levelling paving stones.
Nothing is on the level on that day. Not in our backyard nor in Washington D.C., where then-president Ronald Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt. I spend the day running back and forth from the paving stones to the breaking news on our TV.
The front page of the Winnipeg Free Press on March 31, 1981.
Fast-forward to July 13, 2024, and I’m in the backyard with my son, working on a summer holiday project that involves demolishing our aging deck.
We take a break to escape the heat and the mosquitoes as an alert flashes across my phone. FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP SHOT IN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT.
In a matter of minutes, I have access to more information about what transpired at the Republican campaign rally in Butler Pa., than I got in the hours I spent waiting for Knowlton Nash (or whoever was the CBC anchor at the time) to tell me what happened outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where Reagan had been speaking before being wounded and rushed to hospital.
The full-circle, father-son coincidental connectivity I have to these two assassination attempts isn’t the only reason I’ve spent some time reflecting in the past 72 hours.
The first time around, I was a news consumer. This time, I was overseeing how the Free Press would cover and present this historic moment.
The front page of the Winnipeg Free Press on July 15, 2024.
In 1981, news came to the Free Press only as fast as a dot-matrix printer could muster. By comparison, news today speeds almost as fast as an AR-15’s bullet.
But so too does misinformation and rumour. In fact, less than 24 hours after the shots were fired, a conversation with a friend suggested his reading had taken him well down a rabbit hole as regards what might have really happened.
I’d like to think we are better off today, given how fast the various newsrooms delivered information, video, context, maps, analysis and more in the aftermath of Trump being targeted.
Mind you, in 1981, I don’t recall an assassin’s gun triggering outlandish claims, speculation and conjecture.
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