When papers become the news
The Tube
This particular edition of Media Watch is from the vault. Yes, it belongs to the past. We shall start off with an example from American press history and then find a similar one of our own. But the fact of the matter is that this is a story that would have played out several times in each and every country that has an independent press.
That is just how these things play out.
The year is 1948. The place, the United States. Election year and, boy, is it a tough one. The incumbent: Harry “They don’t like him in Hiroshima” Truman. The challenger: New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. The former, a Democrat. The latter, a Republican. Now The Chicago Tribune was a famously anti-Truman paper and had a very clear Republican tilt.
So, it is election night. And, as the discerning reader might know, all papers have a deadline. It is a staggered process; leisure, sports and business pages are amongst the first to go to press, sometime in the evening. Then, moving on to the city pages at night. And then, much later, do the front-back and national pages hit the press. This implies deadlines for the reporters. All news media have deadlines. Even websites, on which you are probably reading this right now, have “rolling” deadlines.
All this gives the editors of newspapers the problem that, say, TV, doesn’t have. When to go to press on election night? Go to press too soon and you miss out on the conclusive result. Go to press too late and risk the paper not reaching the subscribers on time. And this being 1948, if it hasn’t reached the breakfast tables, it’s almost as bad as not being printed.
So the Tribune risks it and jumps the gun. Its analysts were telling the staff that Dewey’s win was imminent. Hence, the most famous headline in the paper’s history. Or, perhaps in all American press’. “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”
But what really twisted the knife was not the mere incorrect headline and the shame associated with it. It was President Truman’s iconic photograph, one that is on almost all lists of American history’s famous photographs, that immortalized the event. A grinning Truman, holding a copy of the Tribune to reporters.
In the Pakistani version of this story, Truman’s hubris – if you can call merely grinning that – pales out.
The year, 1993. Election time. The newspaper, the Nawa-e-Waqt. Now the media group was never quite a PPP supporter. In fact, the only party it has hated more than the Peoples’ is the Congress Party. And its tempestuous love affair with the PML-N (specially the N) was an open secret.
This was a time when the cell-phone had made its appearance in the country, but was far from the common feature it has become since fifteen years ago. Getting real time information was tough.
Well, the group decided to jump the gun and announce that the League has won the polls.
That didn’t happen. The PPP went on to form the federal government.
What Larkana, what Garhi Khuda Bakhsh? There are no jayalas keener than the Lahori jayala. Dwindling their numbers might be but so what?
So these merry men (and women) of the party bought all the editions of that paper that they could. We are talking of stacks upon stacks of yesterday’s paper.
Once they managed, a group converged in front of the Nawa-e-Waqt group’s headquaters in Lahore, near Charing Cross. And burnt the stacks. While performing the bhangra around them. Psychological warfare? No Lord of the Flies, but you know you’re formidable if you can make a fellow who dropped atom bombs on two cities seem timid in comparison.
