One of the most famous photos of an elected U.S. President is the image of Harry Truman holding the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” despite the fact that he was actually the winner of the 1948 presidential election. With live TV not yet mainstream, most people still relied on daily newspapers to learn the election results, leading many in Chicago to believe that Dewey had won.
A sequence of events led to this mistake. First, prior to the election, the Chicago Tribune staff was on strike, which forced the newspaper to adopt a new printing method requiring earlier press deadlines. As a result, on the night of the election, the editor had to make a decision before the full results were in. Since polls strongly favoured Dewey, and the newspaper leaned Republican, they assumed Dewey would win and printed the headline accordingly.
In reality, incumbent President Truman had won by a landslide in the Electoral College. The error was compounded when Truman, traveling by train two days after the election, was handed a copy of the erroneous Tribune edition in St. Louis. He held up the paper for photographers, creating an iconic image that immortalised the mistake.
In many ways, this blunder mirrors the modern rush to judgment in the era of instant news and social media. Today, breaking news spreads at lightning speed, often before all the facts are verified, leading to premature conclusions and viral misinformation. Just as the Tribune’s editors relied on incomplete data and assumptions, we, too, can fall into the trap of reacting to headlines without full context.
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