My folks toured the Capitol last week, and a friend of theirs treated us to a visit to the Newseum. I was glad for a chance to see it, because I know that the Newseum is giving thousands of DC tourists an education in the history, practice, and purpose of journalism, and I wanted to know just what kind of education it offers.
Before entering, I laid out a very simple set of criteria for judging the merits of the museum. First, by whether it meets its own mission, to provide "a forum where the media and the public can gain a better understanding of each other." Second, by asking of each of its exhibits, what argument does it make and to whose benefit?
Upon entering the Newseum, you get a pretty clear idea of how the answer to the second question is going to come out, as you are confronted by a granite wall bearing the names of the founders and funders of the museum, a cabal of media giants that includes the New York Times, Bloomberg, Comcast, Cox, Hearst, ABC News (aka the Disney Corporation), NBC News (aka General Electric), Time Warner, and the Annenberg and Knight foundations for some nonprofit credibility. The entity behind the Newseum is the Freedom Forum, the philanthropic arm of newspaper mogul, Frank E. Gannett's empire. (For a handy guide to these communications empires, check out the Columbia Journalism Review's guide to media ownership).
As we were getting oriented to the 643,000-square-foot space, a friendly guide instructed us to view the introductory film in the lowest level first, then take the elevator to the top level, as the museum "is best seen from the top down." The orientation film is a fast, splashy ad for the news industry. What is news, it asks? Great "firsts," war, peace, love, hate, life, and death, all the great human themes distilled to their most iconic, information-free state. According to the film, there are "big lives" and small ones, good wars and bad. As visitors will be reminded throughout their time in the Newseum, "news" is intimately tied to "Freedom," the single-word lyric to the cheesy anthem that rings in the ears as the film closes.
The space is topped by an impressive terrace offering grandiose views of Capitol Building, the National Gallery of Art, and other Smithsonian properties. Welcome to the lofty heights, folks, leave your sense of self-empowerment at the door, and prepared to be awed and overwhelmed.
The collection is indeed large and impressive, including 4 full pieces of the Berlin Wall, a 3,000 year old Cuneiform brick from Sumeria, perfectly preserved newspapers dating from the early history of the printing press to the current day, and a beautiful and poignant gallery of Pulitzer Prize-winning photography. Also, the space is brimming with dozens of interactive, multimedia infotainment devices like the NBC News Interactive Newsroom, where "you can be a star," but I didn't pay much attention to these.
I was looking for any scrap of critical reflection on the social and political impact of the news industry, and I found some scraps. I was surprised to find a few panels in the opening exhibit that discuss bias in the news, mistakes, frauds, and the ownership and control of news outlets. Of course, in the bias panel, What Liberal Media? was placed side-by-side with Bernard Goldberg's Bias. Mother Jones reports on a Newseum film concerning news bias that is funded by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. I didn't see it, but I can just imagine it was as fair and balanced as the "news" pouring out of Murdoch's properties. As for mistakes and frauds, according to the Newseum, these are the exceptions that prove the rule of journalistic excellence, and infamous news frauds like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair are just so many bad apples.
On media ownership and consolidation, a display correctly tells visitors that we live in an era of unprecedented consolidation in the news and media industries, where a handful of companies "with little or now background in news" have rapidly acquired the majority of news properties. But that's about as deep as it gets. Why is the media consolidated? How did it happen? There is no mention of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that initiated this wave of consolidation, the aggressive and well-funded lobbying for consolidation by groups like the National Association of Broadcasters, or the history of bad policies coming out of an FCC captured by industry interests, an FCC often antagonistic to the public interest. The display leaves it to the viewer to figure it out. Maybe media consolidation is like the weather, just something that happens, nothing I can do about it.
Later, in the "First Amendment Gallery," we learn that "the First Amendment only restricts the government from interfering with free speech. It does not apply to private companies."
These subtle nods to the ever tightening corporate control over the flow of information in society are present, but I fear most attendees will miss them or forget them as larger, flashier messages intrude. As if to cleanse the mind of these darker aspects of the contemporary news industry, visitors quickly find themselves in the 9/11 Gallery, confronted by a large piece of the World Trade Center, twisted and tortured by the attack of that historic day. And then, of course, there is a film. Let me quickly say 2 things: remembering the attacks and the heroism of those who responded is important, and many journalists are to be commended for sharing in that heroism. In the theater, I sat near to a young boy who probably wasn't alive in 2001, and I could tell he was learning a lot from the reporters telling their stories from ground zero.
On the other hand, the exhibit and film definitely approached a "shock and awe" persuasive strategy, and I know I left in a daze, exhausted, my critical faculties dulled for rest of my experience. If one didn't enter the Newseum with some critical faculties to start with, I don't think they would develop them after being exposed to this exhibit.
Hundreds of journalists rendered an impeccable service on 9/11 in the face of the worst of human horrors? True.
The fact of that service establishes all journalists and their corporate overseers as ever vigilant, ever courageous? False.
Somewhere between September 11, 2001 and the aggressive march to war that followed, I think that most journalists in the mainstream media lost their nerve. And that's all I'll say about that.
Overall, the narrative of the Newseum is about scale. At every turn, the visitor is confronted by giant screens, full size news helicopters, satellites, and news vans. The world is big, you are small. The world is remote, we bring it to you. The world is too complex for you, we simplify it for you. Also, did we mention "Freedom?" We have a lot of it here in the USA. Go, USA!
Like so much of the news today, the Newseum celebrates the overwhelming, the iconic, and the spectacular at the expense of the substantive, the challenging, and the truly educational.
What is the Newseum good for? While there is plenty of valuable material inside, I believe the Newseum serves primarily to say "you are free, America, and your freedom is brought to you by Newscorps, Time Warner, and the Disney Corporation."
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"To be sure, [society] cannot exist except through the individuals who serve as its substratum; it is, however, something more than a collection of individuals. A whole is not identical to the sum of its parts, even though without them it would be nothing. In the same way, by coming together in a definite structure..., men [sic] form a new entity which has its own nature and its own laws." -Emile Durkheim, A Course in Sociology
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Why do wars and revolutions happen? We do not know. We know only that to produce the one or the other men [sic] form themselves into a certain combination in which all take part; and we say that this is the nature of men [sic], that this is the law" -Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"A phase transition is a sudden, global change in behaviour arising from the interactions of many constituent particles" -Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
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About Me
- Nathaniel James
- Washington, DC, United States
- In my professional life, I'm the Campaign Coordinator at the Media and Democracy Coalition. Beyond my commitment to advancing the values of justice and democracy in the media sphere through policy change and advancing community media, I have an intense interest in the social structure and process of intra and inter-organizational collaboration; social networks and social network analysis; network theory; complex systems; and emergent phenomenon. The views expressed here are my own and don't reflect the positions of any organizational entity.