How the Newsoleum Buried the Lead

WASHINGTON D.C. — I have fond memories of the old Newseum. It was rather weird, cheesy, and out of the way, stuck onto the bottom of a skyscraper in Rosslyn, Virginia, just across Key Bridge from Georgetown. But it was fairly modest in its aims, put on some good exhibitions, and was affiliated with Freedom Forum, a foundation that, back then at least, actually tried to do some good. Also, admission was free.

Then, Freedom Forum shifted its priorities, shutting down the parts of the foundation that actually encouraged freedom, through freedom of the press, around the world, and focusing instead on a big shiny shrine to the abstract concept. They shut the old Newseum down too, while they constructed the new version in prime tourist land. Now it is a hulking presence, a glass and steel box on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks from the Capitol. I've been watching it go up for several years, and speculating about the nature of the objets de news which would fill it when finished. Recently, my museum-row co-workers and I got an invitation to preview the new facility and I jumped at the chance, since after it opens it will cost one $20 to get in. Also, I was especially curious about the structure I'd watched them build on top of the thing. It seemed incongruous, cheeky, possibly subversive.

On appointed day I dutifully paused before the Newseum doors to read the inscription on the front wall. There, 74 feet high, etched into marble cladding like the epitaph on a tombstone, is the First Amendment. This bit of history is officially, part of the Newseum's raison d'etre:

Organizers said the museum's mission was to explain how the media had covered historic events and to educate people. "The First Amendment is a very fragile thing right now," Charles L. Overby, chairman of the Newseum, said in an interview. "We want to take people beyond the musty, dusty facts and make them understand why a free press is so important…"

Some of this is hard to argue with. Certainly the First Amendment is fragile today. But that is partly Chairman Overby's doing. He's a die-hard Republican activist and major GOP contributor. As member of the Bush 2004 team, he helped perpetuate a faith-based administration (with limitless Divine Rights). Bush's people zealously censor anything that might reflect badly on himself — flag-draped coffins or e-mails to the "Justice" Department, for instance. It's true, people are still free to say whatever they want, off the air, and also to assemble peaceably, provided they don't mind being spied on. As for petitioning the government for redress of grievances ( grievances like being raped, tortured or wiretapped without a warrant), that's a quaint old notion that, along with the Geneva Conventions, went out of fashion on or about September 11, 2001.

But perhaps Overby is a real embodiment of contradictions, for both Bush and the First Amendment. After all, in addition to chairing the museum and Freedom Foundation he's an executive in the private prison industry. Still, one might wonder if Overby misspoke here: "We want to take people beyond the musty, dusty facts...." That sounds odd coming from a museum chair, since museums have for centuries been conservators of the musty and dusty, in service of fact and beauty. Granted, there are new theories on this. The newly-opened Creation Museum blithely dispenses with musty facts and even learning per se, commanding the visitor: "Prepare to believe."

Certainly the Newseum takes a similarly imperative tone as one steps through the doors into the ponderously named The New York Times–Ochs-Sulzberger Family Great Hall of News. The hall is indeed great, in the size-matters sense. It's a high, echoing void, accessorized with an actual news helicopter and an unlaunched relay satellite. It is also bombarded with the newest news from a giant screen reminiscent of the Two Minutes Hate. I found the glass and stone space alienating and headachy, like a hangover in an airport waiting-room, throbbing with the feed from cable news. But the Newseum's wordsmiths see it this rather fragmentary way: "Around, above and below, visitors to the Great Hall of News are surrounded by a continuous flow of news. Instant, breaking historic news that is uncensored, diverse and free."

I wanted to ask who had the remote, but couldn't even find anybody to explain who decides what's on the tube, or how. It any case, it will be always be well-dressed, sharp-featured folks reading the news on the Jumbotron, people with six- and seven-figure salaries at risk, so "continuous" and "instant" as it may be, it won't be any of those other admirable adjectives, least of all "uncensored". It was, after all, the eponymous Sulzberger's people who sat on both the Valerie Plame story and the warrantless wiretap story until after the 2004 elections, at which point the citizens themselves couldn't really act on the revelations. Perhaps it's time to amend the Times' motto to "All the news the Decider finds fit to print."

At the east end of the Sulzberger Hall is a mezzanine that looks down into the "Berlin Wall Gallery", which holds a few graffitied sections of the erstwhile wall, and an actual Communist guard tower. When I first saw this I wasn't sure what it had to do with the news; I wondered for a dizzying moment if we weren't recycling it (in the manner of Abu Grahib prison) for usage on the Mexican border. But no, according to Newseum scholars, it's "A Barrier That Couldn't Block Information."

The Berlin Wall was strong enough to stop a tank, but it couldn't stop news from getting into East Germany by word of mouth, smuggled messages or radio and television. This gallery tells the story of how news and information helped topple a closed and oppressive society.

I remember having the impression, when the wall came down, that it was things like rock and roll, movies, bluejeans, supermarkets, Marlboros, Mediterranean vacations, living wages, or rather East German hunger for them, which toppled it, and not "news." It might be even be more accurate to say marketing or advertising brought the wall down, not news, but then again, that's a distinction news organizations don't mind blurring lately.

I walked up a level and found myself in a more "interactive" place. On this foor one finds the NBC Interactive Newsroom where one can "be a TV reporter," that is, take a microphone, get before a camera and do a stand-up, with a sort of Daily Show faux background electronically inserted. You can either ad-lib your piece, or if uninspired, read from an actual teleprompter. Then,when you're back home, you can go to the Newseum website, which explains:

If you visited the Newseum recently and participated in the "Be a TV Reporter" experience, you will need the code printed on your photo to download your video and photo.

I wonder how you get the code off a photo you have yet to download, but I imagine they're still tinkering with the system and/or the instructions. Still, imagine the thrill of validation one will get once one does download; after all, in the 21st century, to be is to be on TV, and this is the next best thing.

While waiting for the other "reporters" to quit hogging the cameras, one can play some other "interactive games" on computers nearby. In one, you chase your own news story. I was already sort of doing that one, so I skipped it in favor of a touch-screen "journalistic ethics" game. Here one is presented with visual aids and asked to consider some journalistic quandaries. 'Would you sneak a camera into the death chamber to snap this woman's execution?' 'Would you doctor this photo to make it more dramatic?' After you make your choice you learn the story behind the image (Somebody did sneak a camera in to snap this picture of a woman's execution! This photo has been doctored for more drama!), and also how other normal people voted, as well as how "actual journalists" voted. I was especially struck here by the Newseum's touching use of Chris Carter's harrowing, Pulitzer prize photo of the vulture and naked, starving Ethiopian tot: 'Would you snap the picture or help the child? Or both?' Unsurprisingly, most normal people would snap the picture and help the child. Thankfully, the Newseum doesn't complicate the choice with the musty fact that the child in question is just one of untold thousands in this plight and so there is effectively nothing you can do, except maybe take the picture and weep, and then, as Chris Carter did, kill yourself a few years later. That might take the fun out!

There were ethical quandaries not addressed by the touch-screen game, but raised by other exhibits, as I discovered on the next floor up, in the Internet, TV and Radio hall of historic news milestones. It offers photos, wall-text, audio playback and video displays, a booming, buzzing profusion of historical newsiness. I was a little disturbed to find in one of the early items a glaring mistake. Under picture of the mythic ship the wall-text asserts, "On April 14, 1912 the world learned of the Titanic's tragic fate through radio telegraph transmissions called Marconigrams…." The dusty, nitpicking fact is (as even many DiCaprio fans know) that the Titanic hit the iceberg in the last minutes of April 14th. The first radio call didn't go out until Tax Day was well started, and "the world" certainly didn't learn of the mishap until somewhat later. Maybe newsfolk no longer care about such details but museums are supposed to.

But there are considerably less trivial errors and omissions enshrined here. Before I had worked my way through Internet etc. to the alleged latest thing in news — the newspaper blog and the "citizen-journalists" at the Virginia Tech massacre — I began to note a distinct rightward slant in the 'education' being dispensed at the Newseum. My antennae first went up when one wall-text described a milestone of the Reagan Era thus:

The repeal of the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987 freed stations from having to present both sides of an issue, the same freedom newspapers have always had.

That final clause about "the same freedom," seemed like a fat thumb on the scales of balance omitting as it did, any mention of obligation possibly incurred by use of the public's invaluable airwaves, to which these unfettered newspapers have never laid claim. A few feet south of this entry, I found a picture of President Clinton and Vice-President Gore at the signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The wall text below explains blandly that this allowed for a whole lot of media consolidation but makes no mention whatsoever that this might be deleterious or even controversial. But perhaps this is not surprising, given the many, many billions which the Newseum's major donors have reaped from said consolidation.

It did seem a bit odd to me that such marginal figures as Sean Hannity and Matt Drudge are pictured here among news giants. Drudge is remembered, in affected fedora, for his breaking of Monica-gate. I don't recall why Hannity is there, but it definitely wasn't for his well-documented ties with neo-Nazis. Also here is an actual rejected ballot from the Florida election of 2000, beside it a nickel-bag of successfully detached chads. The import here seems to be something about how the media were very silly on election night, getting up to all sorts of "Dewey Defeats Truman" foolishness before the grownups in Supreme Court robes finally sorted it, omitting any mention, of course, of how African Americans just happened to have their ballots disallowed at ten times the rate of whites. A few feet away, I found a section on the next election's big scandal, Dan Rather's "deeply flawed" though undisputedly factual reportage of W's absentee "service" in the Champagne Squadron. I must admit that I was distracted from these objets, by Bill Clinton's frequent reappearance on a wall of screens looming overhead, as he silently disavowed "sex with that woman."

The Newseum's agenda here isn't quite as one-sided as the Creation Museum's. (Alas, there is no Walter Cronkite astride a dinosaur.) And there is some admission of reactionary "mistakes," like vague remembrances of McCarthy and more vivid ones of segregation; Woodward and Bernstein have their pictures here for reporting… something or other. But one notices a real bias in manner and frequency of representation. There are far too many depictions of Rush Limbaugh as Historic News Figure, starting with one where his lofty stature is suggested by his pairing with President George H. W. Bush. A few feet south of this there is Limbaugh again, this time in fire-breathing caricature on the cover of Time. On the other hand, somehow many photos of Democrats and/or GOP critics just seem to be less dignified and stirring, as do the quotes attributed to them (Oprah Winfrey: "Freedom of the press rocks!" ) Throughout the institution, there's a stilted preoccupation with and Bill Clinton's impeachment and a distinctly curious take on the 2000 Florida election. But perhaps most noticeable is the use of "9/11", history's ultimate "If it bleeds, it leads" story, and the one the GOP has its biggest flag planted in; it has its own giant hall centered around a poignantly twisted TV-transmission antenna. It figures into many other exhibits as well. On the fourth floor, I passed through an odd theater with a 100-foot screen, whereupon are projected constant acres of sensational TV news footage. The almost empty space roared with a quick-cut montage of 9/11 footage, which bled into Iraq war footage, and then, just as I was leaving, Paul Bremer gleefully announced from the electronic podium, "We got 'im!" — by which he meant Saddam. Surely I'd just seen a video reiteration of the spurious Saddam/Al Qaeda linkage, which nobody but Dick Cheney believes in anymore. I fled with my headache.

Up another level I found a bit of respite in quiet, dark spaces. In the Pulliam Family Great Books Gallery I found an oddly distancing tribute to books that are the historical "cornerstones of freedom." Of course all the great books are under glass, like fossils or relics, but there are screens where one can zoom in on selected pages of Tom Paine, the Magna Carta, et cetera. I tried to envision Dan Quayle, a member of the Pulliam clan, cozying up to one of these musty tomes, but somehow it didn't compute. Then a hidden projector threw glowing words on the wall above the encased books, "To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice," and it seemed like a visitation from the Land of the Dead. I moved out towards the light, and found myself in the somewhat redundant News Corp. News History Gallery. There, in a display rack, one can peruse hundreds of historical front pages — if one is wearing a miner's lamp. It was still so so gloomy that I could only read the headlines, so I browsed among the display cases on the wall, which hold various photographs, gizmos, books and wall text pertinent to media history. There's an old Radio Shack TRS "Trash" computer that people once used to file stories over the phone lines, there's the On-Notice board from the Colbert show — grizzly bears, topping it this day. Not surprisingly I found enshrined here News Corp. magnate Rupert Murdoch's many-buttoned phone, captioned, "On this phone he made deals involving nearly $20 billion, including the acquisition of DirecTV and MySpace.com." Clearly, media consolidation isn't an issue here.

There was a section here devoted to the odd media screw-up, an acknowledgement that though, as the wall text had it, "Most news organizations strive for fairness, balance accuracy…." well, stuff happens. Most of it, the wall-texters seemed to feel, is the result of "competition for scoops" and "deadline pressure." But there have been some rotten apples; Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jack Kelly, all have their pictures in a rogues' gallery of outright fabulists. Judith Miller is pictured nearby, illustrating problems with "anonymous sources." I was just stooping to read her too-small wall text when a young woman, intent on the same mission, nearly knocked herself unconscious on the protective glass, which she hadn't noticed in the gloom. I confess I was so concerned for her, and flustered by her embarrassment, that I never even learned what problems Miller had had. (Touch-screen ethics item: "A White House operative wants you to smear a whistleblower. Do you run the story as dictated and preserve your cozy access, expose the treason of the operative to the citizens, or…?) As the bruised woman teetered off, steadied by her companions, I was again distracted by the discovery of an item with nearly limitless educational possibilities: yet another picture of the Titan, Rush Limbaugh.

News Corp. depicts Limbaugh alongside Al Franken under the rubric "Modern Day Partisans." The wall text reads:

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh helped fan an anti-big government fervor in the 1990s that led Republicans to a congressional majority for the first time in decades. "Engaging liberals is simply one of the more enjoyable side effects of my wisdom," he said. In response liberals launched Air America Radio in 2004. Among its hosts: comedian, actor and author Al Franken. "It's advocacy," he said. "I still see myself as a comedian."

An astute teacher of rhetoric could make good didactic use of this text. He or she might invite his students to examine its framing of the issues, for though at a glance it might seem just facetiously descriptive, upon close inspection it proves misleading to the famous even "and" and "the"[31] degree.

Fundamentally, the writer wants to smuggle in, unchallenged, a notion very dear to his paymasters: Republicans and "conservatives" are somehow anti-big government. But this is only so when it comes to safety regulation, health-care, Head Start and similar productive, protective and cost-effective "nanny state" programs. When it comes to wars (war on drugs, war on terror etc), prisons, police, secret-police, surveillance of the populace, "police state" programs, then Republicans are ready to hand out no-bid, cost-plus, blank checks on the Treasury accounts. Note, more particularly, note that here Rush gets to be a "conservative talk radio host" and Al is twice a "comedian," instead of, say, Senatorial candidate. Rush is depicted as effective and influential; he helps to reshape Congress, whereas Al is part of a direct but decade-retarded "response" to Rush's history-making efficacy. (Nothing else happened, 1994-2004, that led to Air America?) Finally, Rush gets to claim that he 'engages liberals' with his 'wisdom,' when, in fact, his talk-show calls are very carefully screened so that he hardly ever talks to anyone who isn't a Dittohead — that is, in complete agreement. Meanwhile, Franken ends up sounding more partisan, trivial and, worst, boring, as "advocate-comedian," though in truth it is he who has engaged the opposition quite directly, and wittily.

Rush's perhaps self-disclosing choice of words here, "side effect," could have just as easily, and much more honestly inspired an alternative wall text. So, assignment, reframe the contrast here, adding both useful information and human-interest zing:

None So Deaf

...as those who will not hear. Right-wing loudmouth Rush Limbaugh has deafened himself, and now must use cochlear implants to hear to those who call into his radio program. His deafness is quite possibly a side effect of his years-long criminal use of Vicodin and Oxycontin, the so-called "hillbilly heroin." His taste for drugs didn't stop him from advocating prison for drug users and this advocacy didn't stop him, once charged, from pleading for rehab in lieu of jail time.

Wholly Without Merit

Harvard educated funny-man and writer Al Franken penned a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. After he taunted Fox News personalilty Bill O'Reilly at a book fair, Fox sued Franken for use of their trademarked phrase "fair and balanced®". The case was literally laughed out of court, being derided as "wholly without merit factually or legally" by the presiding judge, who added that the "fair and balanced®" claim might be so dubious as to legally invalidate the trademark. Fox News did not appeal. The book became a bestseller thanks to the free publicity. Franken suggests that "wholly without merit" might be Fox News' new motto.

Now I would gladly pay 20 bucks admission to the sort of Newseum that featured this type of education, but Fox News' parent company isn't likely to sponsor it.

Having my fill of such fairness, I at last ascended to the top floor. Months before I'd watched girders forming the footprint of the glass house crowning the newseum. There was something odd about its angles; it tapered at the west end, then flared out, as to accomodate broad shoulders then tapered gradually down the long section running off towards the Capitol. One morning I finally realized what shape was: a coffin! Could it be that the architect had put one over on the clueless media tycoons and had them top their celebration of homogenized bullshit with ironizing quotes? Oh, it was devoutly to be wished.

Alas, it doesn't seem to be such a perfect coffin from within it. And it's kind of interesting in there; one can read the day's front pages from scores of newspapers around the world. Outside the glass gallery there is a balcony with a beautiful views of the Capitol, Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue. It's a very nice space.

There are some other nice things about the Newseum. I'm told that the rather Disneytronic "4-D" film is fun, though not for those prone to motion sickness — which is why I can't attest personally. The restrooms are emblazoned with blooper headlines like "Editor's Wife Rented to 2 Suspects FBI Says," and "Trial Ends in Mercy Killing." The food services downstairs are provided by Wolfgang Puck, so the grub is good, as you might expect, if also a bit pricey. You can go around back of the structure to The Source, Puck's bar/bistro, and drown your despair in the company of his very decorative staff. Or you can cross 6th Street to Capitol Grille and drink with some of the Beltway Bandits who cause that despair.

But the Newseum is most assuredly the sepulcher of a dead institution. Probably there was never a golden age, when fast-talking hard-drinking mavericks of the press raked muck and spoke truth to power impartially, but things are clearly deteriorating. Thanks to deregulation, ever more of American media are controlled by fewer and fewer huge corporations. Many media corporations are controlled by radically right-wing partisans (Sinclair, Paxson, Clear Channel) who are eager to shape content. Even in the rare case when media executives' personal sympathies are with the Democrats, they are inclined to support Republicans because they believe it is in the corporate interest. As VIACOM chair Sumner Redstone put it:

There has been comment upon my contribution to Democrats like Senator Kerry. Senator Kerry is a good man. I've known him for many years. But it happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican Administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.

Indeed, the Bush administration, particularly through the offices of former FCC chair Michael Powell has been very, very good to media billionaires, reinforcing the impression that a network's support for Bush, will bring favorable treatment. Historically John McCain has been a fierce proponent of media deregulation. That's part of the reason why he has a real chance to be President, despite his historical support for increasingly disastrous policies and programs. Another part of the reason is that the networks love a "race." They hate a blowout, no matter how much one side may deserve a drubbing, because people tune it out, diminishing the reporters' sense of their own importance or centrality. In the months to come, the zombie forms that have taken over news organizations will, in ways subtle and not so subtle, do all they can to protract the Democratic race, and then to keep McCain viable, no matter who his opponent is. Next January, when the newly inaugurated President goes up Pennsylvania Avenue, we may well see a very a meta image, a network covering itself covering itself, in the Jumbotron of the media conglomerates' monument to their own power.