THEODORE ROOSEVELT | A vacationing Teddy Roosevelt decries the proliferation of "faked" news

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

TYPED LETTER SIGNED ("THEODORE ROOSEVELT") AS TWENTY-SIXTH PRESIDENT, TO PAUL DANA, COMPLAINING TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK SUN ABOUT ONE OF HIS REPORTERS

2 pages (8 7/8 x 7 1/8 in.; 224 x 180 mm) on a bifolium of blue-embossed blue White House letterhead, Oyster Bay, 30 July 1902; lightly discolored at edges.

Theodore Roosevelt and Paul Dana were friends and political allies, both members of prominent New York families and both graduates of Harvard. But a few days after entertaining Mr. and Mrs. Dana at his Oyster Bay home, which was doubling as a summer White House, the President judiciously takes Dana to task for printing unfounded stories.

"There are all kinds of ridiculous stories faked continually by the different newspaper people here, The Associated Press and Scripps-McRae people have not been doing it. After some hesitation, I think I ought to tell you that your man ha been doing it. None of the newspaper men come around the house or ever see me, and the stories they send out are for the most part sheer inventions. Your man does not seem to be malicious in his inventions, but he deliberately makes up stories which ["never" originally typed here but crossed out in ink] might [underlined in ink] have happened, but which as a matter of fact do not happen. … I do not know that there is much harm in the stories, but still they have not a word of truth in them, and they lean towards the ridiculous. It seems to me that they are not proper stories to be told about the President or the members of his family, and are not proper to appear in the columns of a paper like the Sun—being for the most part without any foundation in fact."

Roosevelt, however, does not simply make a complaint to Dana; he also offers a solution to the situation. "Next week I shall have a day's target practice on the [presidential yacht] 'Mayflower,' and I should like to take the representatives of the three press associations. But I very much wish you would send instead of your present man at Oyster Bay some one who will tell the fats as they are and will not try to make up for the fact that nothing is happening here by having recourse to invention."

In closing, the President explains that he is not trying to conceal anything from the press: "The plain truth of course is that I am living here with my wife and children just exactly as you are at your home; and there is no more material for a story in one case than in the other!"

It is likely that Roosevelt was objecting to "human interest" coverage of his family, whose activities he insisted were "out of bounds" for the press, according to Sun reporter David S. Barry (see Harold Holzer, The Presidents vs. The Press, p. 99).