The Newseum heads to the morgue

It wasn’t always this way. When the Newseum was launched in 1997 as a project of the Freedom Forum (itself spun off from the media behemoth the Gannett Foundation), its first incarnation was a modest, dome-shaped structure behind Gannett and across the street from the old American Spectator building in Rosslyn, Virginia.

Much like the decor in the Spectator offices, the first Newseum’s collection was mostly a bunch of journalism curios. But where the Spectator had a sense of humor, with displays such as a life-size papier-mâché dummy of H. L. Mencken, the Newseum did not. It beckoned its visitors to look with awe upon the great relics of journalism past: World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle’s typewriter, the eyeglasses of a reporter who died at the battle of Little Bighorn, and a necklace once owned by former Washington Post owner Katherine Graham. It also had a display devoted to the search engine LexisNexis, that secret weapon of journalists, free and open to its visitors’ use.

The point of all of this? To convince the public that the press matters.

“Most people outside the profession don’t really understand who we are and what we do and how and why we do it,” Newseum Executive Director Peter Prichard said at its opening. “We hope our visitors will come away with a better feel for the business and a deeper appreciation of the importance of the First Amendment.”

But the Newseum soon found that, in windy Rosslyn, it is hard to make people care about the press’s important work. So, in 2000, it dropped $100 million on a plot of land just a stone’s throw from the National Mall. About a year later, the Freedom Forum hit a wall. A shrinking endowment, a bearish market, and the purchase of the new land forced it to close many of its overseas offices and to shut down programs dedicated to educating journalists.

The foundation faced a tough choice: keep its employees and services or build the museum. It chose the latter.

“The Newseum is going to attract more than a million people each year,” Chairman Charles Overby promised. “While I regret closing the international offices, there is no doubt in my mind our priorities are more important than ever before.”

The usual construction setbacks delayed the new building’s opening from 2005 to 2008, but as the scaffolding came down in bits and pieces, Washingtonians saw they were in for a treat. Etched in stone on the Newseum’s facade were the words of the First Amendment, seven stories high, like a gigantic tablet bearing only one commandment.

NBC’s Meet the Press host Tim Russert was enthusiastic as the opening date drew near. “At your new location on Pennsylvania Avenue, you will make an indelible mark,” he told Newseum trustees before his untimely death in 2008.

The enthusiasm reached fever pitch at the building’s inauguration. In a speech, Board Chairman Alberto Ibarguen praised the building’s many new exhibitions, including the largest piece of the Berlin Wall in the United States, the interactive “news ethics” exhibition, and, above all, a series of studios that allowed visitors to play newscaster in front of a green screen. This was to be the museum’s “greatest teaching moment,” he proclaimed.

“Visit after visit, each child will have the same set of facts but record his or her own version of what’s newsworthy,” he said. “Then, as classmates compare and discuss their reports, they discover and learn from their different approaches, each true, each different.”

But, as often happens, the reality fell far short of the ideal. There were many children, myself and my six siblings included, who, on the museum’s very first day open to the public, used this on-camera opportunity to ignore the teleprompter, go off-script, and shout things such as, “We’ll do it live!” After all, that’s how the real newsmen do it.

At the interactive ethics exhibition, us children made “unethical” choices: moving the bodies at the battle of Gettysburg for better photographs (as Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner actually did) just to see how much the museum’s computer system would scold us. We giggled in a movie theater playing a film of newscasters covering terrorist attacks, which was set to the tune of John Mayer’s Waiting on the World to Change. By presenting itself so self-importantly as the representation of the press’s arbitration of truth and agency in societal progress, the Newseum only invited mockery and, as the years wore on, disregard.

The Newseum only draws about 800,000 visitors per year, not helped by its $25 price tag for admittance. The costs of maintaining so many interactive exhibitions has been a weight since the beginning, but after 10 years of losses, it has finally become unsustainable.

It’s not as if the First Amendment doesn’t matter or that news coverage isn’t an important part of American public life. But memorializing the press as an institution? There’s no point. Journalists are only bystanders to history, just like everyone else.

Maybe that just wasn’t apparent in 2008. Social media hardly existed, and most respectable news still came from print newspapers. It seemed like the press was a definable institution that could be cataloged in a museum. The way news coverage has developed in the past 10 years has consistently refuted that notion.

The Newseum is just the latest victim.

Nic Rowan is a writer in Washington, D.C.