The copy was the sameOne story, four papers, four headlines · 1933 to 2013
One story, four papers
The copy was the same
The facts usually got printed. What got printed on top of them is what people kept.
On 27 October 1933 the Associated Press filed one story from Jaffa. Four American papers ran it. The words underneath are identical in all four, down to the punctuation.
Police today fired upon large unruly crowds of Arabs demonstrating against a recent increase in Jewish immigration, killing an undetermined number and wounding others… A crowd armed with firearms, sticks, stones and other missiles endeavored to break through a police cordon. After making several baton charges, the police opened fire.
Associated Press, Jaffa, Palestine, 27 October 1933 — as printed in all four papers
Then each paper wrote its own headline.
Same story. What each headline told the reader.
Four papers. One story. A reader in Roanoke learned that police shot people protesting an immigration policy. A reader in Rockford learned that there had been a mob.
Nobody lied. The full story is there in every one of the four, and a reader who finished it would have known that police fired on people protesting an immigration policy. Most readers do not finish. They read the headline, and four headlines made four different events.
It happens in a caption too
April 1957, Gaza. A wire photographer takes a picture of a woman feeding a sick child in a hospital bed. Two papers run it four days apart with the same caption, word for word. One of them puts three words on top.
Indianapolis Star · 7 April
“This Arab mother, a displaced Palestinian, spoons food for her
child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza…”
CP-1957-003
American Press, Lake Charles · 11 April
“LUNCH ON THE U. N. — This Arab mother, a displaced
Palestinian, spoons food for her child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in
Gaza…”
CP-1957-020
287,000 people, gone from the record in four years. Nothing happened in between. No return, no resettlement. Two papers counted, and a reader who read both watched a quarter of a million people disappear.
They did print it
None of this means American papers refused to report. They reported. In April 1948 the Evening Star of Washington took three days to go from calling Deir Yassin a village “a Jewish striking force occupied” to printing a Red Cross count of 254 dead and several hundred words from a wounded twelve-year-old girl who had lost her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, two brothers and a baby sister.
Six years later a man wrote to a Louisville paper demanding that a Palestinian
produce the evidence; heresay and generalities are not proof.
It had been
sitting in a Washington daily since 1948. Nobody corrected him.
The reporting was not the failure. The keeping was.
Somebody said this at the time
In May 1988 a Rochester paper sat six local men down for two hours and printed most of a page of it. Abraham Kharroubi, forty-four, born in what is now northern Israel:
The main problem is that I as a Palestinian have constantly been seen by the West as a refugee or a terrorist or an Arab — never really addressed as a Palestinian.
He was describing what it felt like from inside the coverage in 1988. What follows here is the paper trail on the other side of it: one story reaching different towns, the facts intact, the headline doing the work. The words were usually there. The headline is what survived.
There are eight more cases here where one story reached readers through two or more papers. Find any of them, read the two headlines, and decide which one you would have kept.