by John Leo
Leo is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of U.S. News & World Report.

The public seems to find TV and movie bloopers hilarious and endearing, but it's safe to say that no such enthusiasm is lavished on the gaffes of journalists. dewey defeats truman, a victory that was confined to page one of a single edition of a certain Chicago paper, is always good for a traditional chuckle. But who knows or cares that that UP (father of UPI) once announced that World War I was over when it wasn't, or that Time Warner's Pathfinder site managed to declare O.J. Simpson "Guilty!" on the day the jury turned out to have a somewhat different opinion?

Why is it that the movie Titanic could find no room in its 194 minutes of screen time to discuss the most famous headline ever published by the Baltimore Evening Sun? all titanic passengers are safe; transferred in lifeboats at sea said the paper's page one head of April 15, 1912. And it's heartwarming to know that the famous headline is still giving assurance to Sun readers. Certain editors have been known to send the headline to people who complain that the paper doesn't carry enough positive news.

The Sun's famous mistake, repeated by the Los Angeles Express, had many authors -- a White Star spokesman who kept explaining that the Titanic was unsinkable, radiomen who garbled emergency messages and the usual mix of reporters eager to beat the competition with news almost certain to be correct, since everybody already knew the ship couldn't possibly sink.

One confident but verb-free deck of the Sun's erroneous headline said towing great disabled liner into halifax. This phrase had some basis in real-world confusion: a message sent from ship to ship in Morse code confused Titanic with a no-name oil tanker, which in fact was being towed to Halifax because of engine trouble. A few frantic radio operators who came upon the message in the middle of transmission assumed the report referred to Titanic and passed the word on. The moral for modern days: assume nothing.

All journalists know that it's never enough to get it wrong. Those who do are expected to cluck over those who don't, so the New York Evening Sun ran a sidebar chiding The New York Times for publishing a ridiculous story that Titanic had sunk. The Wall Street Journal chimed in on a positive note, congratulating the builders of the ship for averting what might have been a serious accident. "The gravity of the damage to the Titanic is apparent, but the important point is that she did not sink," wrote the Journal. The reason for this marvel was that "her watertight bulkheads were really watertight."

Garbled accident reports are hardly the worst reportorial sins. The worst always involve getting it wrong on purpose. The name of Walter Duranty comes up quickly. Duranty covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times in the Stalin era. He is perhaps the only Pulitzer winner that The Paper of Record would fervently like to forget.

At first a critic of the Soviet Union, Duranty soon evolved into an enthusiastic supporter and state-of-the-art propagandist. One of his favorite comments was, "I put my money on Stalin." When friends asked about Stalin's tactics, Duranty liked to say "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Not that he noticed many broken eggs in Russia. When Stalin engineered massive famine in the Ukraine to help break resistance to Soviet control, Duranty told Times readers that "any report of a famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." In 1933, at the height of the famine, he wrote of abundant grain, plump babies, fat calves, and "village markets flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter at prices far lower than in Moscow." He added that "a child can see this is not famine but abundance."

In fact, the death toll was enormous and Duranty knew it. He told colleagues privately it was in the range of 10 million. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge said Duranty was "the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met." But the Pulitzer committee praised Duranty's reports for their "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and clarity." Four errors, arguably five, in a single phrase.

Eventually, Duranty's Soviet coverage provoked debate among his editors and readers. To its credit, the Times editorial page challenged his accounts. But in the genteel journalistic world of that era, his reporting was never odious enough to get him recalled or fired. The embarrassing Pulitzer has never been withdrawn or returned.

Fake stories live forever in journalism. Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes was sold in 1971 to McGraw-Hill for $750,000 and Time-Life for $250,000. The Hughes hoax was either unusually bold or unusually stupid, since Hughes was still alive and therefore in a good position to notice that he hadn't written an autobiography.

The fake diaries of Adolf Hitler could not be challenged by the alleged author, dead for almost forty years. In 1983 The German magazine Stern acquired rights to sixty-two volumes of the diaries, purportedly pulled from the wreckage of a cargo plane nine days before Hitler's suicide in 1945. Stern described the miraculous discovery of the diaries as "the journalistic scoop of the post World War II period."

British historians David Irving and Hugh Trevor-Roper helped the cause by pronouncing the diaries genuine, though both later had second thoughts. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine why anyone believed the hoax for a minute. Biographers said Hitler never liked to take notes, preferring to dictate to secretaries (as well as nations). Entries in the diaries continued even when Hitler was known to be injured. After the July 20, 1944, bombing attempt on his life, Hitler's arms were swollen and swathed in bandages or compresses. Yet the diaries had an entry supposedly written that day.

Experts said the handwriting was not even close to Hitler's. Chemical analysis of the books' binding showed that it contained polyester threads, which were not produced until after World War II. The glue contained postwar chemicals too. The physical appearance of the diaries alone should have raised alarm. All sixty-two volumes, supposedly written over a thirteen-year period, were precisely alike and all their pages were miraculously unstained and unworn.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the parent of London's Sunday Times, bailed out of an agreement to pay $400,000 for British and Commonwealth rights to the diaries. So did Paris Match and Italy's Panorama. But Newsweek decided to publish. Its May 2, 1983, cover story raised the possibility of fraud, but shrugged it off. The story contained one immortal line, "Genuine or not, it almost doesn't matter in the end." This is believed to be first time a major news organization informed readers that it didn't much matter whether the news they were getting was true. Whatever.

The most famous modern fake was Janet Cooke's Pulitzer-winning 1980 story in The Washington Post, "Jimmy's World." Cooke finally admitted the flashy, shocking story of an eight-year-old heroin addict was a composite of quotes and events that didn't happen. Translation: it was a fabrication and the Pulitzer had to be returned.

Cooke, then 26, was one of the paper's rising stars. "People here like you," Post publisher Donald Graham wrote to Cooke after the Pulitzer was announced. "They think you're the kind of journalist the Post needs for its future because you understand people and you get part of their natures into your stories." Graham's praise was a brave act, since doubts about "Jimmy"s World" had circulated at the Post for months and there were almost as many fears about nominating the story for a Pulitzer as there were about printing it in the first place.

The Post pushed for a Pulitzer largely because of the doubts, on the premise that if the paper didn't nominate "Jimmy's World" it would have looked as though the paper didn't believe the story. "In for a dime, in for a dollar," said Bob Woodward, Cooke's editor, surely one of the less confident ways of backing a reporter for a major prize.

The grim joke at the Post after the scandal was that Cooke's story, like her glittering and mostly faked credentials, were "too good to check." Cooke told Woodward that if she disclosed the names of characters in her story, her life would be in jeopardy.

Before the Cooke scandal, reporters routinely insisted on keeping the identity of a confidential source secret from their editors. In the post-Cooke world, most editors want to know the names. Many papers try harder to check credentials too, particularly when credibility is in doubt. Cooke said she had graduated magna cum laude from Vassar, earned a master's degree at the University of Toledo, studied at the Sorbonne, was an accomplished pianist, and spoke four languages. An hour's checking surely would have unraveled her fictional past, but nobody made the effort. A Post reporter said that Cooke, who was 25 when she arrived at the paper, "would have had to be at least 35 years old to have done all the things she told people she had done."

All these reservations hovered in the background and never coalesced into a decision to spike a story so few staffers really believed. Race was a factor, if only because Cooke was describing a black inner-city reality that few of her white bosses knew anything about. The Post was under heavy pressure to improve coverage of its majority-black hometown. Post editors felt that an exceptional young reporter had suddenly given the paper credibility in an area where the paper had been historically weak and vulnerable to criticism.

A similar mix of doubt and irresolution produced the disastrous Tailwind story at CNN. Ambiguous statements by an 87-year-old retired admiral in a nursing home were taken as confirmation that deadly sarin nerve gas had been used in Vietnam. Viewers were not told that a primary source for the story had not mentioned nerve gas in his book about Vietnam and had come forward only after a sudden bout of "recovered memory." Denials and doubts were played down as a strong story line took shape. Time let the story go unchecked, though Time's doubts showed in the weak and inconclusive head it put on the big scoop: "Did the U.S. Drop Nerve Gas?" Most gallingly for the news business, a famous Vietnam reporter said he was a bystander on a story that starred him on CNN and carried his by-line in Time.

Like Cooke's editors at the Post and Duranty's at the Times, Tom Johnson, c.e.o. and chairman of CNN, had many doubts, but decided to go ahead anyway. In these scandals, editors had plenty of time to reassess or spike bad stories. That's a luxury the profession will have less of in the twenty-first century. In an age of high-speed journalism, the risks are greater and the decisions had better be sharper.

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