The Press: What Happened?

Is there iniquity in my tongue? Cannot my taste discern perverse things? . . . Teach me, and I will hold my tongue: and cause me to understand wherein I have erred.

—Job VI

With perverse taste and awkward haste, some newspapers last week tried to write off the appalling election performance of the U.S. press as an amusing little joke. The Washington Post sent a can’t-we-be-friends telegram to President Truman: YOU ARE HEREBY INVITED TO A “CROW BANQUET” TO WHICH THIS NEWSPAPER PROPOSES TO INVITE NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL WRITERS, POLITICAL REPORTERS AND EDITORS, INCLUDING OUR OWN, ALONG WITH POLLSTERS, RADIO COMMENTATORS AND COLUMNISTS . . . MAIN COURSE WILL CONSIST OF BREAST OF TOUGH OLD CROW EN GLACE.(YOU WILL EAT TURKEY.) . . . DRESS FOR GUEST OF HONOR, WHITE TIE. FOR OTHERS —SACK CLOTH . . . (The President graciously declined, wired the Post that “we should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”)

Dazed but unrepentant, Broadway Columnist Ed Sullivan began and ended a piece by asking with a silly smirk: “Wha’ Hoppened?” The Alsop brothers, who had considerably more reason to ask, airily wired their editors that “these particular reporters prefer their crow fricasseed.”

How Wrong Can You Get? But the humiliating fact that the press had been completely wrong on the outcome of the election could not be laughed off. Furthermore, the blame could not be brushed off on the pollsters (see below), politicos and pundits, or even on the stupidity or slyness of the voters. The blame, as a few top editors sadly admitted in their painful soul-searching after election day, lay primarily on the press itself.

It was not because 65% of the press (with almost four-fifths of all U.S. readers) had supported the losing candidate. By almost the same percentage, the press had supported the Republican candidates of 1936, 1940 and 1944.* (Historically, the press has always been against strong Presidents like F.D.R., mistrusting their great power as a threat to democracy.) It was the privilege of the press to support whom it pleased; but it was the duty of the press to find the news and report it correctly.

The press was morally guilty on several counts. It was guilty of pride: it had assumed that it knew all the important facts—without sufficiently checking them. It was guilty of laziness and wishful thinking: it had failed to do its own doorbell-ringing and bush-beating; it had delegated its journalist’s job to the pollsters.

Read All About It. The press (TIME and LIFE included) had planned postelection issues on the seemingly safe basis that Dewey was in. Hundreds of editorial writers and syndicated columnists, who had turned in their regular Wednesday stints in advance, had struck the same note. Therefore, on election night, from London’s Fleet Street to San Francisco’s Market Street, newspaper hellboxes overflowed with type that was hastily dumped as the returns came in. (One groundless gossip-columnist report: that LIFE had to junk an issue with Dewey on the cover.) Not all caught themselves in time.

Even when they were confronted by the actual news that proved them wrong, some editors refused to believe it, or report it. The morning after the election, the face of the U.S. press wore a ludicrous look. The Republican Detroit Free Press, for example, put its final edition to bed at 3:30 a.m. At breakfast its readers heard on their radios that Truman was winning —and on Malcolm W. Bingay’s editorial page, they read about the “Lame Duck President … a game little fellow . . . who went down fighting with all he had . . .” Flanking the editorial were Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann and Marquis Childs, all out on the same limb. Chicago’s Journal of Commerce, in its “final” edition, referred to “President-elect” Dewey and was full of such heads as “New Regime Must Shape Trade Policy.”

Three Little Words. Right up to the early hours of Wednesday, Colonel Bertie McCormick’s Chicago Tribune stubbornly carried the banner headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. Below it, the Trib’s veteran Washington bureau chief, Arthur Sears Henning, wrote placidly that “Dewey and Warren won a sweeping victory in the presidential election yesterday … by an overwhelming majority of electoral votes.” When Harry Truman got a copy, he chuckled: “That’s one for the books.”

Misreporting hit a new low on the West Coast. Los Angeles papers, with a two-hour time differential in their favor, can rush eastern returns into print before the polls on the Coast close. The temptation for pro-Dewey papers to stampede some voters aboard the bandwagon was irresistible. Cried a headline in Hearst’s afternoon Herald & Express: DEWEY VICTORY SEEN AS VOTE LEAD GROWS. The fact: some small New England towns had gone for Dewey. A later headline: DEWEY SWEEPING THE COUNTRY. The tabloid Mirror was equally sly with EARLY TREND GIVES DEWEY LEAD. It was based on the vote of Hart’s Location, N.H., which gave Dewey 11, Truman 1.

We Happy Few. When the long night was over, all but a few red-eyed newsmen were red-faced too. The New York Star’s Jennings Perry could point with pride to an almost-right October column titled “It’s Closer Than You Think.” In the small Garden City (Kans.) Telegram (circ. 5,238), Columnist (and publisher) Gervais F. Reed had piped that Dewey would be upset. And on Oct. 25 the Prescott (Ariz.) Courier (circ. 4,720) had said that, thanks to a divine power, the President would be “sustained in office.” (The publisher’s wife is a Democratic national committeewoman.)

But such exceptions were few. Shocked and shaken, Pundit Arthur Krock of the New York Times confessed the press’s sins of omission: “We didn’t concern ourselves, as we used to, with the facts. We accepted the polls, unconsciously. I used to go to Chicago and around the country, every election, to see for myself. This time, I was so sure, I made no personal investigation . . . We have to go back to work on the old and classic lines—to the days when reporters really dug in, without any preconception . . .”

In a letter to his own editor, the New York Times’s Reporter James (“Scotty”) Reston said: “The great intangible of this election was the political influence of the Roosevelt era on the thinking of the nation . . . We were wrong, not only on the election, but what’s worse, on the whole political direction of our time.”

But many hard-working political reporters, looking back on their campaign coverage, could not see how they could have done better under the circumstances. Even their best sources had failed them, apparently led astray by the polls. Said one last week: “If a professional like Jake Arvey thinks his Democrats will lose Illinois by up to half a million votes, how can a reporter know that they’ll win?”

The Old-Fashioned Way. Trying to sum up the failure and its lessons, TIME Correspondent Edwin C. Heinke, Assistant Managing Editor of the Indianapolis Times, wired: “The returns made me realize how good, old-fashioned legwork—the kind I hadn’t done—was still the most important part of our press structure. I think that a good deal of our press reporting has strictly gone to hell; there is too much thumbsucking, too little pavement-pounding . . . From now on, Indiana is neither G.O.P. nor Democratic to me. I know I’ll have to dig to find out. It has been a wonderful lesson to those newspapermen who still have enough sense left to know that they got a lesson the hard way, and that they’d better brush up again on the fundamentals.”

Was the press going to profit by its lesson? Already, here & there., the process of rationalizing the error had begun. And the soreheads were getting in their licks. Wrote the New York Daily News’s John O’Donnell (who had first asked to have the paper’s lady astrologist assigned to the Washington bureau) : “O.K., they were all wrong (most definitely, including this writer) on the Truman election. So what? So were the voters who elected Truman.” Sneered George Sokolsky: “Truman gave out during the campaign, becoming boisterous and vulgar. Some say that he made votes for himself that way. If true, that is a reflection on the intelligence of the American people.”

At week’s end, many newspapers decided, like Uncle Toby, that they should wipe it up and say no more about it. Nevertheless, the fact that the press had so misinterpreted events right under its nose raised the grave question of whether it was doing an equally bad job in interpreting news in other fields than politics.

* In the 1945 British elections, the British press, 80% Tory, made the same mistake. Some 80% of the press, having supported the Tories and predicted that they would win handily, was shocked by Labor’s victory. That time, the Gallup poll happened to be right.