Word: press
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...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...
...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...