Ghost of 'Dewey Defeats Truman' haunts every news organization

Twenty years ago I wrote an Election Day column predicting that the headline the next day in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner would tell the tale of the presidential race.

It was a terrible prediction, given that the outcome of the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore would not be decided for more than a month, ending with a landmark Supreme Court ruling that almost tore the country apart.

News organizations have held off on calling the Trump-Biden race, but that may change by the time you read this.

The ghost of “Dewey Defeats Truman” haunts every newspaper and the prospect of a mistaken headline like that in the Chicago Tribune gives nightmares to editors. It’s one thing to correct errors electronically, but when your mistakes are preserved in print, it’s almost impossible to erase them.

In Ketchikan, editor Sid Charles made the same mistake in 1948 that the Tribune did. He published the immortal headline, “Dewey Next U.S. President.”

He followed it a day later with, “We’re Wrong: It’s Truman.”

In Fairbanks, reporter Georg N. Meyers, later the sports editor of the Seattle Times, said the paper had prepared dueling headlines giving the presidency to Republican Thomas E. Dewey and another announcing the election of incumbent Harry S. Truman.

“The News-Miner, like practically every other paper in the country, had a hard time getting its election extra on the streets Wednesday morning,” Meyers said.

Many people had expected Dewey to win and a lot of the background material readied for the inside of the newspaper was based on that assumption. Political columnist Drew Pearson had written a column naming likely cabinet members for President Dewey.

“It took a frantic substitute column teletyped to subscriber papers throughout the nation to keep Pearson from naming all the new staff members who would cluster around the new president in the White House on the day Truman went back to it,” Meyers wrote.

There was at least one occasion when the Fairbanks newspaper was wrong about the winner of the presidential race. In 1916, editor W.F. Thompson got ahead of himself and the nation’s voters when he declared, “HUGHES IS WINNER.”’

He published that headline on Election Day, relying on the scanty and incomplete results that showed Charles Evans Hughes leading incumbent Woodrow Wilson. Fairbanks and its main newspaper were struggling to survive at that time and Thompson didn’t believe in erring on the side of caution.

The next day, Thompson stepped back with “THE CHICAGO HERALD SAYS WILSON WINS,” and followed that a day later with “WILSON IS RE-ELECTED.”