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.