I used to know your daddy

So you might have noticed a bit of a flap last week about the NYT's swapping out a 1A hed between editions (which the Times quickly detailed a deputy ME to explain). To the party press, this was proof of the Apocalypse:

Blowback against the New York Times over a headline about President Trump's response to recent mass shootings is a frightening precedent, according to Mollie Hemingway.

The fact several media and political figures were able to convince the paper to change its headline after the first edition exposes the collective outrage as a "mob," Hemingway claimed Tuesday on "Special Report."

"Clearly, the first headline was more factual and less opinion-y than the second headline -- which was not a very well constructed headline," the Federalist senior editor said.

Should you find yourself giving a flip what Mollie Hemingway thinks (hey, it's a free country), you're still entitled to wonder: Have none of the rubes at Fox News ever worked on a multi-edition fishwrap? Where, at least when newspapers were newspapers and dinosaurs stalked the Earth's cooling crust, things changed between editions all the freaking time? But since the America First press was leading the charge in 2019, let's flash back to an earlier case of editioning with the polarities somewhat flipped.

Confession time: I've written earlier, at least in the context of the Chicago papers, that by the time the presses rolled on Dec. 7, 1941, for Monday's editions, newspapers were of one mind. I stand corrected. As Life magazine reported (Dec. 22, 1941), the New York Daily News -- run by Joseph Medill Patterson, northeastern terminus of the isolationist "McCormick-Patterson axis" -- got the war onto the front page, but the edit page still sported a cartoon worked up in advance by C.D. Batchelor.

If you haven't heard of Batchelor by name, you know his work -- probably the death's-head seductress War tempting "Any European Youth" in 1936 to come upstairs with the line "I used to know your daddy." She was back for Monday, Dec. 8, smoking "soldier cigarets." (It's way small to read in the image above, but Life notes that they were labeled "Youth, Anzac, Asiatic, American.") This, evidently, would not do, though I'm sure The Federalist would be happy to note that it had factuality going for it, so Batchelor got cranking and had "Victory -- and only Victory" ready to go for the second edition. When duty calls, and all that.

Does that make the Times a good guy, a bad guy, or just another paper that runs into occasional unpleasant consequences from getting rid of the copydesk? Up to you (though if you canceled your subscription, you surely helped Fox more than you hurt the Times). But we can at least note that attitudes have changed fast in the great New York papers before, and if the vermin press didn't complain then, they don't have a lot of leeway now.