Unhappy Landings

Howard Robard Hughes's flight around the Temperate Zone (see pp. 36, 50) last week had every managing editor poised for a beat on his local rivals. Day of the fliers' return to the U. S., "Cissie" Patterson's sprightly Washington Times appeared on the streets with a four-column, front-page picture purporting to show the plane on the landing field in Minneapolis. Same day, in its final edition, the Times crowed that it had beaten its competitors to the street by 27 minutes with the story of Hughes's landing in New York.

Next day, on page three of Frank Brett Noyes's dignified Star appeared a three-column ad headed: TRUTH ALONG WITH SPEED. That picture "in an afternoon paper yesterday," the Star snorted, was not Hughes's plane in Minneapolis but Hughes's plane at Floyd Bennett Field before the takeoff. Proudly the Star reprinted its genuine shot of Hughes in Minneapolis.

Same afternoon, in a front-page notice, the Scripps-Howard tabloid News pointed out that its own presses were printing papers telling in minutes and seconds the time of Hughes's arrival in New York six minutes after it happened. Scowled the News: "Now, if the Times was on the street 27 minutes before the News, it must then follow that the Times was telling about the event before it occurred. This is known, in the parlance of poker and questionable duping of the public in journalism, as 'cold decking'!"

The Times, same day, admitted the caption writer had "misunderstood the instructions. . . . Those who don't make mistakes never make much of anything else."

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