In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s Hillary’; Jeremy Hunt wins the Tory leadership contest. The British Library has something similar at its Breaking the News exhibition. The difference is that these ones actually made it to the newsstand. It’s enough to make any passing journalist break into a sweat.
‘Titanic sinks, no lives lost’, reported the Westminster Gazette in April 1912; ‘King Louis XVI dodges the guillotine’, we are told in the 1793 issue of the London Packet. The Sunday Times’s 1983 Hitler diaries hoax appears in this hall of infamy. So does ‘The Truth’, the Sun’s calamitous front cover in the days after the Hillsborough disaster.
News junkies will find plenty to enjoy here. For glum hacks worried about the death of print, there’s something reassuring about the timelessness of the stories on display. ‘Strange news out of Essex’, screams the front cover of one exhibit.
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