Once a year, the Managing Editors' Association of the Associated Press—a sort of club within a club—has a soul-searching session. Last week, in Chicago's Drake Hotel, it was in full and mournful cry. With the election fresh in mind, the managing editors of A.P. papers found plenty to search their souls about.
The breast-beating was mostly over; the incurably forward-looking editors had closed ranks and gripped hands on a determination not to commit such sinful errors again. As far as the A.P. was concerned, it had done its usual good job of reporting the state-by-state returns with speed and accuracy. But, like everybody else, it had been slow to realize that the vote was going to contradict the opinion polls. Said the New Orleans Times-Picayune's George W. Healy Jr.: "Even when Truman was leading, [A.P.] always put Dewey first, saying he was leading in ten states with say 100 electoral votes, and Truman was leading in 14 states with 280 electoral votes."
Blame from a Reporter. The A.P. had tried to make things clear on election night. At midnight, A.P. Executive Editor Alan Gould had told the New York staff: "Now we must stress the fact that Truman is keeping his lead . . . until now, Dewey has been the story even where he is behind." (Why Dewey was still the story when Underdog Truman was obviously the news, Gould did not say.)
At 2:30 a.m., the Washington bureau, anxious to provide guidance for its members, had wired papers around the country for their latest vote estimates. It wrote 300 words of guidance but threw the story away as too inconclusive. Four years from now, sagely suggested the Washington Post's James R. Wiggins, "the A.P. should put out an hourly bulletin reminding its members that an American election is never over until the last vote is counted."
The misinterpretation of the early returns was a small part of a big problem that the A.P., brought up on strict factual reporting, still has to solve: how can it interpret complex news without losing its prized objectivity? Ex-A.P. man James B. ("Scotty") Reston, a topnotch interpretive reporter for the New York Times, and a guest speaker, let off a blast of steam on the subject: "I think [our] future depends on our developing adequate and intelligent means of explaining what is going on in the world. The news is getting more complicated every year.
"Without an explanation," said Reston, "the mere fact that the President has proposed to send Vinson to Moscow would have no meaning at all ... Straight news reporting of such stories leads them to uses for which they were never intended." Sometimes, he said, the A.P. removes one slant from a story only to give it another: "When [the A.P.'s] Jack Bell reported, "That's the first time I ever had a lunatic engineer," Mr. Dewey said sharply,' the A.P. desk in New York shouldn't have changed 'sharply' to 'facetiously'. . . At what point do you slip over from explanatory reporting and get into opinion, so that you should be run on the editorial page?" Wilbur Cogshall of the Louisville Courier-Journal said that individual papers must decide. When Cogshall's paper finds Scotty Reston too interpretive, it runs Reston on the editorial page.