Never Assume

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Today is the 65th anniversary of the appearance on the news racks of physical proof of perhaps the most spectacularly bad headline decision ever.

As I have mentioned before, I used to work on newspaper copy desks, and I understand the temptation to write a headline for a story when you already know — or think you know — how it is going to turn out even though it isn't official.

I worked on sports copy desks, and there were often times when Super Bowls or something similar became lopsided early and, even though much of the game had yet to be played, it was clear which team would win. On such occasions, we felt we had extra time to work on our headline, and most of the time we were right.

(I always felt that we held ourselves to somewhat higher standards at those times, given that we had the luxury of time to reflect and come up with just the right headline. I have always been proud of a headline I wrote at the Arkansas Gazette about a college football game that got out of hand early.)

That is one of the biggest differences between writing a sports headline and writing a news headline, I suppose. Most team sports events are rigidly timed. When one team grabs a big lead over another, the game eventually reaches a point when it is no longer possible for the other team to come back. (Baseball is the sole exception to that rule, I guess. In baseball, as Yogi Berra said, it really ain't over until it's over.)

But news doesn't work that way — as the folks at the Chicago Tribune found out on this day in 1948. They probably knew it already, but what happened 65 years ago was a reminder to them and a cautionary tale for the generations of editors to follow.

It was a banner headline about the 1948 presidential election, which was held 65 years ago yesterday. It famously proclaimed "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" in big bold letters on Page 1.

History remembers the 1948 campaign as Harry Truman's "Give 'em hell, Harry" campaign, the greatest political comeback ever. The 1948 election made Truman the patron saint of political lost causes. I can't remember a single political campaign in which the underdog failed to invoke the memory of Truman and his upset win as evidence that anything is possible (regardless of whether the cause was really lost at that point or not).

When I was a journalism student, they told us about the 1948 election and the Tribune headline — and I'm sure it is still this way in most schools — as a reminder never to assume.

Sixty–five years ago, the folks on the Chicago Tribune's copy desk made a huge assumption. They assumed that Tom Dewey, Truman's Republican opponent, would win the election, and it was a reasonable assumption to make. Truman was the incumbent, but he was unpopular. In June 1948, Gallup reported that only 39% of respondents approved of his job performance.

It may have been due, in part, to wishful thinking on the part of the Tribune. It was a Republican–leaning paper and had called Truman a "nincompoop" on its editorial page.

And there is no doubt that still–primitive polling methods played a huge role, too. There were flaws in polling methodology that would be corrected after the election, but the flaws were firmly in place before the voters cast their ballots as the polls persistently predicted Dewey's victory for months. Pollsters were convinced that most voters had made up their minds in September and stopped polling weeks before the election, thus missing a late shift in Truman's favor.

It has been estimated that as many as 14% of voters who originally intended to vote for Dewey decided in those final weeks to vote for Truman or someone else — or not at all.

And part of the reason was due to deadline pressure.

As Tim Jones of the Tribune writes, "a printers' strike ... forced the paper to go to press hours before it normally would." The accelerated deadline forced the managing editor to make the kind of judgment call that no editor wants to make early on an election night. He had to choose a headline for a story that wasn't over when he made the decision — but would be when the readers picked up their papers the next morning.

Obviously, he made the wrong choice. He relied on polling data that was weeks old and made the pollsters his scapegoat — even though he had also depended too much on the judgment of the Tribune's Washington correspondent, who was almost never wrong, as well as the fact that LIFE magazine had just published a picture of Dewey with the caption "the next president of the United States."

It was a huge mistake, but remember, this was in the days before the internet, before cable TV. Heck, TV was still in its infancy in those days, anyway. Few people outside the Chicago area knew of the headline faux pas — until Truman, who was returning to Washington by train, made a stop in St. Louis and was handed a copy of the Tribune with its erroneous headline.

"He had as low an opinion of the Tribune as it did of him," Jones wrote. "Truman held the paper up, and photographers preserved the moment for history."

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.

A Lot of Alliteration

As someone who has worked more nights than I can count as a copy editor for a morning metropolitan newspaper, I have to express my admiration when an intriguing headline catches my attention.

I have just seen one such headline at the website for the Minneapolis Star–Tribune.

Let's back up just a little bit, shall we?

Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced today that he will not seek a third term as governor of Minnesota next year. Speculation has been that he is going to run for the Republican presidential nomination, but he sidestepped questions about that.

So Bob Von Sternberg wrote an article for the paper summarizing what "political observers" were saying — and I guess it came as no surprise that most people think he is, indeed, positioning himself for a run for the nomination.

But there was a lot of speculation last year that John McCain would choose Pawlenty to be his running mate. That, of course, did not happen. But it could have. As I recall, Pawlenty himself pulled the plug on the idea as the Republicans prepared to convene in Minnesota.

So, since he didn't gain the national attention he could have had last year, Pawlenty may not be planning a national campaign in 2012, especially if winning that nomination means taking on a popular incumbent. Although Obama's popularity undoubtedly will fluctuate in the next three years, there is no telling (in 2009) whether it will be on the upswing or the downswing in 2012.

There's no rush. Pawlenty's only 48. He'll be in his mid–50s when 2016 gets here.

He might be planning to challenge Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a first–termer who comes up for re–election in 2012.

Anyway, the headline on the article is "Pundits ponder Pawlenty's presidential prospects."

Not bad, huh?