1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
When we left young reporter Albert Gordon, he had come to the remote Pacific island of Opeki looking for peace, quiet, and perhaps enough spare time to write a novel.
Instead, he became an American consul, diplomat, military adviser...and finally King Tellaman, the Peacemaker.
Now the real trouble begins.
A German warship arrives off Opeki and claims the island. Gordon responds with the confidence of a newspaperman who has spent his career wishing for the chance to become a great war correspondent.
There is only one problem:
If there isn't enough of a war to report, Gordon may just have to help create one.
A German flag comes down. The Stars and Stripes goes up. A cannon fires. A German warship answers.
And suddenly Gordon realizes that he has stumbled into the greatest newspaper story of his life.
With Stedman manning the cable, Gordon begins sending dramatic reports back to civilization. But somewhere along the cable line, the facts start becoming considerably more exciting than the events themselves.
A skirmish becomes a battle.
A few damaged huts become devastation.
Rumor becomes massacre.
And newspapers and governments thousands of miles away begin reacting to events that never actually happened.
Soon Gordon faces a newspaperman's worst nightmare:
The world believes his story...but the story isn't true.
And now warships are coming.
Lots of them.
Richard Harding Davis turns the second half of The Reporter Who Made Himself King into a hilarious and surprisingly sharp satire about journalism, sensational headlines, imperial ambition, diplomacy, and the dangerous distance between what actually happened and what the public is told happened.
Considering Davis wrote the story in the 1890s, some of it may sound remarkably familiar.
Join us for the conclusion of THE REPORTER WHO MADE HIMSELF KING, by Richard Harding Davis, right here on 1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales.
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These aren't simply crime stories. They're journeys back into the time and place where the crimes occurred, when investigators had fewer tools, newspapers could make or destroy reputations, and one mysterious case could captivate an entire nation.
Look for 1001 True Crime From Another Time wherever you listen to podcasts, and discover some of history's most unforgettable crimes, mysteries and investigations.
1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
Great stories never grow old.