Dewey Defeats Truman
Possibly the most glaring example of fake news is the banner headline across the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune (as it was then called) on the morning of November 3, 1948. A famous photograph of an overjoyed Truman, grinning from ear to ear as he brandishes the obviously incorrect newspaper on a train platform, has saved that bit of inaccuracy for posterity. Given the President’s relationship with that particular newspaper the moment was likely especially sweet for him.
The election of 1948 saw three candidates for the office of the Presidency, Democrat and incumbent Harry Truman, Republican Thomas Dewey, and so-called Dixiecrat but actually independent Strom Thurmond. The years of Truman’s Presidency had been exceptionally difficult as the nation came out of the war economy and struggled with recession, the emerging Cold War, the collapse of the British Empire, and the need to care for its several million veterans. Truman’s popularity was at a nadir.
Throughout Truman’s years in office leading up to the election of 1948 the Tribune had been a thorn in the President’s side, and the paper and President loathed each other. Only about 15% of the nation’s newspapers endorsed a Truman election, but few had gone as far as the Tribune, who had called the President a nincompoop on its editorial pages, and had strongly endorsed Dewey. According to national polls, Truman’s low popularity and the defecting southern Democrats who called themselves Dixiecrats ensured Dewey would be the first Republican President in sixteen years.
Publication deadlines and the means by which the Tribune was printed meant that the early editions needed to be typeset before the polls even closed in many states, and the Tribune relied on the judgement of Arthur Henning, its Washington correspondent, for a prediction of the outcome. Henning in turn relied on the polling data and his personal contacts to make the prediction of a Dewey victory. The Tribune’s headline was also based on the response of its readers and others to its many attacks on Truman throughout the campaign.
Over 150,000 copies of the newspaper with the famous erroneous headline were printed before it was clear that the report was incorrect, and how many Chicagoans awoke to learn that Truman had been defeated before learning later in the day that he had won is unknown. Undoubtedly it was many. Truman ended up carrying over 300 electoral votes and the Democratic Party won control of both houses of Congress. The fake news report on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune was short-lived, but epic.