Dewey Defeats Truman

At first, I couldn't believe my eyes.

But there it was, in black and white.

"First woman House speaker may be toppled," said the headline at the Reuters website.

And my first thought was that — in this midterm election year that is looking as bleak for many Democrats as the search for jobs has been for many unemployed Americans — Nancy Pelosi is in electoral trouble.

But then I realized that, if Pelosi really is in trouble, that might be the biggest story in American politics since the Republicans captured the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in that special election back in January.

Pelosi, after all, has held her House seat for more than 20 years, and she seldom drops below 80% of the vote.

The very idea that she might be in trouble was absurd, once I thought about it. If there had been even the slightest inkling that Pelosi — who is clearly a lightning rod for the right wing — is in danger of being booted out by her heavily Democratic constituents, word certainly would have leaked out long ago.

The thought that she might be in danger of losing her seat surely would have been seen as an obvious sign of a Democratic apocalypse.

After all, Pelosi's counterpart in the Senate, Harry Reid from neighboring Nevada, is in a tough fight for re–election, and there has been no shortage of articles about it in the media or references to it in political speeches.

Reid's in trouble, and everyone has known it for a long time. He's every bit as reviled by the right as Pelosi is. But, until today, I had heard nothing — nothing! — from the campaign trail in Pelosi's district.

Logic insists that, if there was any chance Pelosi could be driven from office, Republicans would be pouring money into her district and sending their biggest guns to campaign there.

But I've heard no suggestion that Pelosi might not win another term.

And, when I read the article, I realized that what the headline was talking about was the possibility (which I believe is a probability) that the Republicans will capture the House in next Tuesday's elections. Consequently, when the new majority takes over, Pelosi will be replaced as speaker of the House.

But speculating about that at this stage amounts to getting ahead of ourselves. The headline took its cue from the article, but it didn't accurately reflect the content of the article.

I felt the headline was misleading. I know what it was trying to say. It just said it wrong.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to it than most. I worked on newspaper and trade magazine copy desks — which included writing headlines on a regular basis — for more than a decade. I taught young journalism students in the 1990s, and I'm back in the classroom as an adjunct today.

When I work with young journalism students today, I preach the same three values that I preached then — accuracy, consistency and clarity.

The Reuters headline doesn't raise any consistency issues of which I am aware, but it does raise a boatload of accuracy and clarity issues for me. As I say, I think it was misleading. It suggested to me — and I doubt that I could possibly be the only one — that Pelosi was in a tight race for re–election.

In a year in which one of the incumbent Democratic senators from California — as well as incumbent Senate Democrats in places such as Arkansas, Nevada, Wisconsin and Washington — are, at the very least, in trouble and, at most, clearly headed for defeat ...

And political observers have been predicting for weeks, without hesitation, that Republicans are all but sure to pick up at least 39 House seats (and probably more) that are currently held by Democrats, thus giving them the majority in that chamber ...

It isn't unreasonable to interpret a headline that says "First woman House speaker may be toppled" as meaning that Pelosi's race was much, much closer than anyone ever would have predicted.

(If that had really been what the article was reporting, I would have felt that we really had veered into through–the–looking–glass territory.)

But that isn't what the article was saying.

I live two time zones away from California, and I have no idea whether Pelosi is even opposed in this year's election. If she is opposed, the Reuters article didn't mention it. Its emphasis was on what would happen to Pelosi after this year's crop of representatives takes office in January — so I conclude that, if Pelosi has any opposition, it isn't significant.

I don't think the headline was accurate, and it certainly wasn't clear. But was that really the fault of the article — or the reporter who wrote it?

I know that early voting has been under way in many states for several days, if not weeks, by now. In fact, I voted early, as I usually do.

But no votes have been counted yet. No offices have been won or lost yet. The Reuters headline and article act as if the election has been held, the votes have been counted, and the Republicans are going to control the House when Congress convenes.

And, if most political analysts are right, that probably is what is going to happen. But it hasn't happened yet.

Reuters isn't in the fortune telling business. It is in the news reporting business, and, while I have issues with the subject of the article, the reporter was reasonably straight forward in it.

But whoever wrote the headline — whether it was the reporter himself or an editor — was guilty of sloppy speculation.

By and large, the article reported the facts as we know them. The headline strayed.

Far too often, newspapers use whatever headline is attached to news service articles instead of writing their own. They do this for many reasons — deadline pressure is always part of it, but today, with many newspapers cutting back on their copy desks to save money, those editors who are left may be more tempted to use a wire service's headlines than they were before.

Those headlines are written with no space constraints or specified point sizes — which can pose many problems for the editors of real–world newspapers as they try to make those headlines fit whatever space they may have for the story.

But, back at the wire service, space constraints are no barrier. In theory, the headline writer's space is, essentially, infinity. With the apparent freedom to write as little or as much as one needs, there is simply no excuse for imprecision.

When I used to work the wire desk, most headlines that came with wire stories generally appeared to be modestly restrained, as if they were written with some kind of limitation in mind.

Perhaps the articles that were written in those days saved most of their long–term speculation for predictions about sports playoffs.

And none that I can recall got that far ahead of actual events in its speculation.

Seems to me it would be a good idea to keep it that way — until the votes have been counted and we know whether a new speaker of the House will be needed.