TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/48elect/48elect.009

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                                                                                November 15, 1948

THE PRESS 

"Study of a Failure"



     Never had the U.S. press been so wrong on the outcome of a
national election. Partisanship was not the answer, though 65% of
the press had supported Tom Dewey. Many of the newspapers,
columnists and newsmen who had supported President Truman had
been just as wrong. The press had compiled an anthology of error
that it should not forget. Some of the dreadful examples:

     -- "Few voters believed that there would be any contest on
Election Day . . . When (Harry Truman) damned the 80th Congress
and the Taft-Hartley law, nobody seemed really to care or to
listen".

     -- Caption on a full-page picture of Tom Dewey in LIFE Nov.
1: THE NEXT PRESIDENT TRAVELS BY FERRY BOAT OVER THE BROAD WATERS
OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY.

     -- Headline in the Manchester Guardian on the election-eve
dope story by U.S. Correspondent Alistair Cooke:

                         HARRY S. TRUMAN
                       A Study of a Failure

     -- The Kiplinger Washington Letter for Oct. 30: "Dewey will
be in for eight years, until '57 . . . 32-page special report on
'What Dewey Will Do' has been prepared and will be mailed to you
within a week, embodied in Kiplinger Magazine." This was followed
by a full-page ad in TIME, after the election: "What will DEWEY
do? Find out in the November issue of Kiplinger Magazine . . . It
will help you dispel the campaign fog."

     -- Election-eve survey in Newsweek: "Dewey -- 375 to 390
electoral votes, Truman -- 100 to 125 electoral votes . . . a
Republican Senate . . . a G.O.P. House . . ."

     -- David Lawrence's U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 5: "Dewey
offers something new for the White House . . ."

     -- The Democratic Atlanta Constitution on election eve: "We
think the Republican nominee is going to win."

     -- Walter Lippmann (writing of the expected interregnum):
"The course of events cannot be halted for three months until Mr.
Dewey is inaugurated."

     -- T.R.B. in the New Republic, Nov. 8: "The G.O.P. victory
in 1946 reduced the riddle of 1948 pretty largely to 'How much?'
rather than 'By whom?' . . . Question asked us most frequently is
'Does he know it?' referring to Truman's impending defeat; kind-
hearted America felt grieved at what she was doing, like
disappointing a child at Christmas: it must have made many Truman
votes."

     -- Richard H. Rovere, in the Oct. 9 New Yorker: "Traveling
with (Truman), you get the feeling that the American people . . .
would . . . give him just about anything he wants except the
presidency."

     -- Drew Pearson's day-after-election column: "I surveyed the
close-knit group around Tom Dewey, who will take over the White
House 79 days from now. Here is the line-up . . ."

     -- The Alsops, same day: "The first post-election question
is how the Government can get through the next ten weeks . . ."

     -- Scripps-Howard's Fred Othman: "We're going to miss
lil'ole Harry . . ."

     -- Broadway Columnist Danton Walker, on Election Day:
"Dewey's first official act as President-elect will be to name a
new Secretary of State . . ."

     -- New Dealing Frank Kingdon in the New Dealing New York
Post Home News: "People had decided last June that Truman was not
big enough for the job."

     -- The Christian Century, under the headline MR. DULLES
SHOULD BE NAMED AT ONCE on Nov. 3: "The constitutional
interregnum . . . cannot be avoided, but if the President-elect
will name his Secretary of State immediately, the damage . . .
will be held at a minimum." This week the Christian Century was
still calling Dewey "the President-elect."

_______________________________________________________________
November 15, 1948
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 fricassee."

    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, 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. [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.]
(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 had planned post-election
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 Lippman 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 thumb-sucking, 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 newspaper 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 raise the grave question of whether it was doing an
equally bad job in interpreting news in other fields than
politics.