The Press: Another Phony

Now it was U.P.’s turn to blush and bluster. At 9:34 Sunday evening U.P. teletypers flashed: WASHINGTON: JAPAN ACCEPTS SURRENDER TERMS OF ALLIES.

Two minutes later the same machines stuttered: EDITORS, HOLD UP THAT FLASH. But the damage had been done.

The Mutual Network broke into Double or Nothing to spread the news, and premature celebrations were touched off in Manhattan’s Times Square, in Canada, where the canned voice of Prime Minister Mackenzie King was promptly put on for a victory broadcast, and even in Australia.

The U.P. screamed that it had been hoaxed, asked the FBI to investigate. Somewhere along its eastern trunk lines, in any of 30 bureaus and newspaper offices east of the Mississippi, someone had fed the false news onto the teletypes.

No U.S. newspaper hit the streets with the phony flash. But radio had destroyed the few minutes’ leeway that wire associations once had to retrieve their errors. So long as scoop-happy radio stations shot from the hip, wire services had to be triply careful what crossed their wires.