When Howard Stern's foul mouth and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction come up in conversation in the U.S. capital, it's usually because someone is trying to ban them. But this week they, along with shock-rocker Alice Cooper, the violent video game Grand Theft Auto and Andres Serrano's controversial 1987 photograph of a crucifix suspended in urine known as Piss Christ, became objects of celebration only a stone's throw from Capitol Hill.
All are included in a rousing film tribute to the First Amendment unveiled here yesterday, as dignitaries and a handful of media moguls threw open the doors on the Newseum, a gleaming new $450-million (U.S.) shrine to journalism set down next to the Canadian embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Capitol Hill and the White House. Sprawling across seven storeys, the Newseum presents a high-tech history of the news media, from a 3,000-year-old Sumerian cuneiform tablet to short films on the Golden Age of U.S. television-network news, and on up to the cellphone used to capture video footage of last year's Virginia Tech massacre.
The museum's calling card is a 22.5-metre marble façade that bears the 45 words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the press and the right to petition the government.
Yesterday afternoon, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Canadian ambassador Michael Wilson offered remarks before U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts officially dedicated the building.
The Newseum hopes to convince visitors not just of the importance of the First Amendment, but also of the vital role of journalists in helping democracies function around the world. It evidently has a tough row to hoe: In a poll conducted last year by the Freedom Forum, the not-for-profit organization behind the Newseum, only 16 per cent of respondents realized the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. Journalists are also on the outs with the U.S. public: A poll last year found 62 per cent of Americans believe the falsifying or fictional creation of stories in the news media is a widespread problem; and only 37 per cent believe the news media try to report the news without bias.
So the Newseum takes a canny approach to the challenge, summed up by its marketing tag line, "Where the news comes to life." It offers a brisk walk down memory lane that doesn't even insist visitors think about journalism. The museum's soft sell begins with 80 front pages of the day's newspapers from across the United States and around the world, printed off at 6 a.m. each morning and placed in glass cases along the front of the building.
"If we depended on people loving the press, we'd go out of business on the third day," quipped Charles Overby, the Newseum's CEO, during an interview this week. "We really built this for tourists who are looking for a rich experience about the news of their lives."
On the bottom level, a few feet from Wolfgang Puck's new light-bites restaurant The Source, visitors can walk up to eight four-metre-high chunks of the Berlin Wall and a three-storey-high concrete guard tower that once stood about a kilometre from Checkpoint Charlie. A few floors up, a crumpled 10-metre section of the North Tower antenna from the World Trade Center stands askew in the 9/11 Gallery, surrounded by dozens of Sept. 12, 2001, front pages from newspapers around the world.
Those in the mood for less grim fare can revel in a film of U.S. sports highlights (the U.S. Olympic hockey team defeating the Russians in 1980, Billie Jean King winning the battle of the sexes, Muhammad Ali vanquishing George Foreman) bracketed by interviews with sports reporters. That 25-minute film is one of 44 video productions in the Newseum, which together run a total of more than 5½ hours.
With Stories of Our Lives, a breathless nine-minute film projected on a 30-metre-wide screen, viewers can zip through the highs and lows of the last 25 years of U.S. history, with a nod to international events (the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the Ethiopian famine and Live Aid, the Bill Clinton impeachment drama, the Darfur crisis), all set to a rock 'n' roll beat. The Internet, TV and Radio Gallery includes 14 cubicles with touch screens that offer more than 50 news clips tracing the history of the 20th century.
"I would say we're a museum of history, we're a museum of photos, we're a museum of technology, we're a museum of interactive games," Overby explained. "We're all of that, plus a museum of news. And we've consciously tried to put all of that in there to get people to come here."
A first-floor gallery features hundreds of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs that unfurl the heartbreaking (and occasionally joyful) history of the 20th century. Visitors interested in the backstories of the photos can step into a glass-walled theatre within the gallery to watch a short film of interviews with photographers and their editors discussing how they captured their prize-winning pictures and the obstacles they faced in getting them published. (The Associated Press picture editor Hal Buell ignored a ban on frontal nudity to get Nick Ut's 1973 photograph of a Napalmed Vietnamese girl onto the wires.)
And those who come to the Newseum wanting to learn about journalism can submit themselves to hours of films about the ethics of biased reporting, the use of anonymous sources, the role of journalism in the U.S. civil rights movement, and the tangled history of the U.S. and the First Amendment.
Visitors can test themselves in real-life journalistic simulations. A game in the Ethics Center challenges visitors to make the right decisions (would you kill a story critical of advertisers? - of course not), as they race against another team in putting together a front page.
And wannabe TV reporters can try their hands at stand-ups in front of a green-screen display of the White House.
Exhibits trace the history of yellow journalism in the U.S., the antagonism women faced as they tried to break into the field in significant numbers (there is a section of the National Press Club balcony railing behind which women had to sit when they were permitted to attend luncheon speeches in 1955), the history of the ethnic press in the U.S., the recent rise of so-called "citizen journalism" (including the video camera with which a JetBlue passenger captured scenes on board a rocky 2005 flight), new media and the growth of media conglomerates.
In the same News History Gallery, hundreds of the Newseum's 30,000-plus collection of archival newspapers are on display in sliding glass drawers. Visitors can read the front page of the Liverpool Echo's edition reporting John Lennon's assassination, and a 1649 pamphlet reporting the death of King Charles I.
Though its focus is on the United States, the Newseum has one eye on the rest of the world, usually where journalists are in danger. To that end, it displays a large map of the world in which countries are assigned one of three colours - green, yellow, or red - indicating the freedom of the press. (Canada is green, but Mexico - much to the consternation of some Mexican reporters visiting the Newseum - is yellow.)
And the Newseum makes it very clear that journalism can be a deadly occupation. The 9/11 Gallery contains the two cameras belonging to Bill Biggart, a freelance photographer who was killed covering the events of Sept. 11.
To the right of the World Press Freedom Map is the pillowcase on which the Canadian TV reporter Clark Todd wrote a goodbye note to his family as he was dying of shrapnel wounds suffered while covering the Lebanese civil war in 1983. Here, too, is the flak jacket worn by ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff, when he was seriously injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq in early 2006. And here is a laptop that once belonged to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan.
A few feet from these artifacts is the most sobering display of all, an opaque glass wall into which have been etched the 1,843 names of journalists who have died in the line of duty, beginning with Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor who was shot to death in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob as he tried to protect a printing press. Every year, the Journalists Memorial will be rededicated as names are added to the wall. Earlier this month, the remains of four news photographers killed in a helicopter crash over Laos in 1971 were interred at the site.
But the news isn't always a downer. The Newseum has the original Weekend Update sign that hung behind Chevy Chase on the Saturday Night Live set, a copy of The Onion satirical newspaper and the script from the first Colbert Report.
And before visitors depart, they will likely visit the washrooms, where they will find journalistic bloopers to make them smile. Canadian content thus (dis-)honoured includes a 1976 headline from the Lethbridge Herald that read, "Drunk gets nine months in violin case," and a 1978 Vancouver Province weather report: "Sunny with a few cloudy periods today and Thursday, which will be followed by Friday."
A legacy in words
Among the quotes that hang on the walls of the Newseum:
"News is what somebody,
somewhere, wants to suppress." - Lord Northcliffe,
British newspaper publisher
"I always turn to the sports
section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures."
- Earl Warren, U.S. Supreme Court chief justice
"The American people don't
believe anything until they see
it on television."
- Richard M. Nixon,
U.S. president
"There are three kinds of people who run toward disaster,
not away: cops, fireman
and reporters."
- Rod Dreher, New York Post
columnist, September, 2001
"Anyone can report anything. You don't have to work for ABC." - Matt Drudge, Internet columnist, 1997
"Freedom of the press is
guaranteed only to those who own one."
- A.J. Liebling, 1960
By the numbers
250,000
The square footage
of the Newseum
14
Number of exhibition galleries
27
Hours of media content displayed in theatres, integrated into exhibition galleries and presented
in kiosks
1,000
Number of images accessible
via interactive touch screens in the Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery
1,000
Number of historic newspaper front pages and magazine covers accessible via interactive kiosks in the News History Gallery
$1.2-billion
Assets of the Freedom Forum, a Washington non-partisan foundation dedicated to press freedom, and the main funder of Newseum operations
S.H.