A museum dedicated to the First Amendment and the history of news criticized as “a monument to journalistic vanity” may not have a home past the end of the year.
The building that houses the struggling Newseum at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW was sold to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million as the museum struggled to overcome budget deficits.
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The Newseum has operated at the location near the Capitol since 2008. It was created by the Freedom Forum, a private foundation and the museum’s main funder. It’s one of the few museums in the nation’s capital that charges for admission.
The museum will remain open until the end of the year. After that, it’s uncertain where it will move. About a quarter of its objects are on loan and will be offered to be returned to their owners, according to the Washington Post. The remaining objects will be stored at a Maryland facility until museum officials settle on a new location.
The Newseum apologized in August after its decision to sell T-shirts that said, “You Are Very Fake News,” prompted widespread criticism from journalists, especially as President Trump used the attack to discredit reporters. It defended selling “Make America Great Again” merchandise, noting that it has historically sold merchandise from all political parties.
Since the museum opened, it has been pilloried for its navel-gazing. Journalist Jack Shafer, who writes about the media, called it “four-years-in-the-building, seven-story, steel-and-glass monument to journalistic vanity” in a 2008 column and questioned how relics about journalism, such as a reporter’s eyeglasses, would teach about the trade.
“The story of journalism is not the story of the surviving relics,” he wrote.
