Posted on 05/01/2008 10:41:24 AM PDT by billorites
If Walter Cronkite's mom was going to put together a scrapbook of her son's career--well, it would be a miracle, because she'd be about 125 years old by now. But if she did, I doubt that it would contain more admiring images of the former CBS newsreader than you'll find in the Newseum, the new journalism museum that held its boffo grand opening this month in Washington, D.C. Cronkite is everywhere in the Newseum. He hovers over it like a guardian angel, or a patron saint. You can't turn around without hearing his phlegmy baritone rumbling out from a hidden speaker or see some grainy footage of him announcing President Kennedy's death or wiping his eyes at the moon landing or definitively pronouncing the Vietnam war a "stalemate."
And that's the way it is--at the Newseum, anyway. But why?
I don't know how the Newseum's curators would explain Cronkite's omnipresence (I do know they would use the word "iconic"), but I have an explanation of my own. Cronkite is a kind of synecdoche for American journalism. His career traces the arc of the news business over the last 70 years, from the grubby, slightly disreputable trade of the early 20th century to the highly serious, obsessively self-regarding profession it has become, here in the first decade of the twenty-first. A college drop-out, plucky but unimaginative, Cronkite knocked around a series of newspaper jobs in the 1930s, followed the troops into Normandy, worked for a wire service after the war, and filed workmanlike copy all the while that was notable for nothing in particular. Then came television, and celebrity, which he acquired thanks to the unprecedented reach of mass media rather than through any peculiar merit of his own. From the 1960s onward Cronkite was transformed by some mysterious process into a figure implausibly larger than a newspaper hack, a spiritual force as imposing and weightless as a dirigible. He was an oracle, a teller of truths, the conscience of a nation, "the most trusted man in America."
American journalism followed the same trajectory into self-importance, borne aloft on the same draft of hot air and vanity. Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum. The Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation seeded with money from the Gannett newspaper chain, conceived and underwrote the museum for $450 million, and a half dozen newspaper and media companies kicked in another $122 million to pay for exhibits and other trimmings. That's $572 million--a lavish sum by any measure. It's especially impressive from an industry that is, according to its own incessant complaints, going broke.
The journalists and former journalists who run the Newseum swear it was worth every centime. It sits on one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the country, the last parcel of undeveloped land on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House. Directly to the south is the majestic West Wing of the National Gallery of Art; to the east is the Canadian embassy, which was the most pointlessly bombastic building in downtown Washington until the Freedom Forum hired the semi-celebrity architect James Polshek to design the Newseum. In his promotional materials, Polshek has declared his building "a functionally cohesive, meaningful and memorable icon." (It's an instant icon--an insticon.) The architect has been insisting publicly that his design was inspired by the unique mission of the Newseum and by the particular qualities of journalism, but anyone familiar with his other famous buildings--the Clinton library in Little Rock, for example--will see precisely the same elements here, deployed to the same effect: the staircases encased in glass, the abrupt shifts in cladding, the enormous glass front wall stripped with thin metallic fins, the acres of blond wood, the tubular trim, the skylights, and, most important of all, a soaring atrium that's perfect for cocktail parties and fundraising dinners. If you know Polshek's buildings, in other words, you know that this is just another Polshek building. I wonder if he thinks the folks at the Freedom Forum won't notice.
The building's one genuinely unique feature--no one else will do it again, now that it's been done once--is on the exterior: a 75-foot-high slab of Tennessee marble projected from the building's front. On it are etched, in letters several feet high, the 45 words of the First Amendment. Putting it there was an aggressive act, a lapel-grabber--thrust over the Avenue, it's unignorable, literally in your face. Yet the Newseum staffers are inordinately proud of it. "If all we had of the building was that wall," the museum's director Charles Overby told a press preview the other day, "then the building would have still been worth it."
Does he mean he'd be willing to spend $572 million on a large slab of marble? Under the circumstances overstatement is probably unavoidable. The ostentatious display of the First Amendment, as though it were a structural element of the building itself, is in keeping with the museum's theme: the subtle conflation of the American news business with the constitutional principle of a free press, as though the one were the inevitable, precious fruit of the other. The theme is hammered home inside the museum, too, though it sometimes gets lost in the conventions of modern museum design. "We wanted the most interactive museum in the world," Overby said, "the most technologically advanced museum in the world. We wanted more flat screens than anyone. In attracting people here to learn about a free press, we wanted to give the visitors a 'Wow' experience." The price of admission is $13 for children, $20 for adults. Wow.
The wow experience has now become mandatory in the design of modern museums. A museum visitor no longer just visits a museum and sees stuff: He is given a visitor experience--a sequence of sensations that can be packaged, advertised, and controlled by the curators. If the visitor experience is interactive, that's terrific; if it's immersive--well, you're going to have one wowed visitor on your hands. For the great enemy of the museum designer today is not ignorance but boredom. Like most public institutions in American life, from movies to libraries to baseball parks, museums are designed with the primary goal of seizing and holding the attention of a slightly hyperactive male adolescent, that cheerful, vacant fellow who has just clambered down from the school bus and has detached himself from the ear buds of his iPod and is in danger of growing fidgety from the sudden lack of stimulation. His discomfort must be avoided at all costs. Sometimes I picture the entire educo-entertainment industry as one of those villagers in the old horror movie Children of the Damned, utterly terrified of offending the alien children lest they turn their scary X-ray eyes on them and . . . poof! Displease the kids and your museum (movie, theme park, retail store, school) is a goner.
In the Newseum, therefore, the stimulation doesn't end. The cacophony arising from the various media--audio and visual--is inescapable. Those flat screen TVs that Overby coveted do indeed pop up everywhere. Two of the video screens, one in the lobby, another in the appropriately named Big Screen Theater, must be among the largest in the world, so preposterously big that their images are impossible to absorb from any point closer than the length of a football field. Other attractions allow kids to "report a story" by interacting with software in a kiosk, play a computer game that lets them pretend they're photo-journalists, and, for an additional fee, get themselves filmed with a microphone standing in front of a picture of the White House or Capitol building. There are 15 theaters in all, running 120 new short films; among the dozen or so I've seen, Walter Cronkite appears in all but two. The signature feature is I-Witness, running all day long in the Annenberg Theater. The promotional literature describes I-Witness as "a customized, high-tech, four-dimensional interactive feature." They're being modest with that interactive. Really, it's immersive.
It's also a perfect illustration of a paradox of the digital age: Overstimulation leads in the end to passivity. I-Witness is a 15 minute film dramatizing three episodes in American journalism history. In keeping with curatorial fashion, the historical information conveyed by the movie--names, dates, places--is kept to a minimum to avoid confusing the kids. Instead, the technology does everything for you, the visitor. After you don your 3-D glasses the camera follows a roller-coaster path through a printing press, and the seats dip down when the camera dips down and up when it tilts up. When objects fly out of the screen, in the time-honored and never-old technique of 3-D, the seats rear backward, as though the visitors can't be counted on to rear backward themselves. Water spritzes you when the camera crosses a river, jets of air hit you during windy scenes. And when digitized rats run across the screen, a rubber tail pops out from below the seat to swipe your Achilles' heel. Nothing is left to the imagination. It's exhausting, and you haven't had to move a muscle.
Other films are less elaborate, but equally uninformative. After paying their 20 dollars, visitors are maneuvered into one of the theaters and shown an orientation film called What's News? It answers that question over the course of nine minutes without managing to convey a fact, though it piles up the visual clichés like cordwood. "What's news?" asks Charles Osgood, the CBS newsreader, as an image of Cronkite shimmers into view. "Love is news [footage of Duke and Duchess of Windsor etc.]. . . . Firsts are news [Jackie Robinson, Sandra Day O'Connor]. . . . War is news [goose-stepping Prussians, General Pershing]. . . . Hate is news [cue Hitler and Bull Connor]. . . . Life is news [gurgling babies and, weirdly, birth control pills]. . . ." The personages and events fade in and out without any attempt to identify them, as if today's school children could recognize Wallis Simpson. But information--ironically enough for a museum dedicated to news--is not the point. When the lights come up the visitor has no idea what journalists are good for, but he has imbibed the vague sense that journalism, whatever it is, must be a portentous enterprise.
The notion builds. An exhibit on the history of journalism amasses a riot of artifacts and places them helter-skelter in long glass cases, glowing in a darkened room. First we see a dangling press pass and a cassette audio tape: the very press pass worn in 2004 by a reporter for the Hattiesburg American whose tape of an off-the-record talk by Antonin Scalia was briefly confiscated by cops. That's the tape, right there. The actual mouse pad used by Peter Jennings is down the case from a red sweater that Helen Thomas wore to a presidential press conference, across from a notebook jotted in by the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff during the Lewinsky scandal. A TV screen hovering above a door from the Watergate office building shows footage of Walter Cronkite.
An old typewriter is identified as the real typewriter used by Al Neuharth, founder--coincidentally--of the Freedom Forum. Elsewhere is the tape recorder Susan Stamberg lugged around during the early days of NPR. An entire corner of the museum is given over to a shrine to the TV personality Edward R. Murrow: Behind a wall of glass sits the sacred desk, the passport, the war uniform, the trunk that was once opened by his hands, and upon which, perhaps, his bottom once rested. There's also a teletype used by Walter Cronkite. The history of journalism culminates in the final display, which shows--you may now slit my throat--the slippers once worn by the blogger Wonkette. While she blogged.
The sanctification of journalism and journalists reaches its climax in a hall of martyrs called the Journalists Memorial. It holds a series of glass panels listing the names of 1,843 journalists who died on the job. Again the criteria for inclusion are wide open, taking in both Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered by a mob for publishing his newspaper, and the TV reporter David Bloom, who died in Iraq of a blood clot. Reminders of journalism's dangers are placed throughout the museum as spooky memento mori: a shrapnel-riddled van used by photographers in Bosnia, Daniel Pearl's laptop, Bob Woodruff's flak jacket, the car that carried the newspaper reporter Don Bolles, blown up by the Arizona mafia in 1976.
For the unimaginably vast majority of journalists, of course, journalism is as dangerous as bagging groceries at Whole Foods. But these scattered totems of danger and violence have the effect of elevating journalism in glamour and importance. The visitor is left to wonder: What are these guys doing that's so dangerous? Why are people trying to kill them?
The Newseum, again like most contemporary museums, is subliterate--it communicates to the visitor more through visual than verbal cues--but as you walk around you can't miss several aphorisms etched in marble, and these serve as an answer to such questions.
NEWS, AT ITS BEST, REVEALS THE TRUTH.
THE FREE PRESS IS THE CORNERSTONE OF DEMOCRACY.
PEOPLE HAVE A NEED TO KNOW. JOURNALISTS HAVE A RIGHT TO TELL.
The slogans carry all the subtlety of posters at a reeducation camp. Together with the slab of marble out front, they drill home the Newseum's controlling idea: Anointed by the Founding Fathers, the news business is a trade apart, something uniquely precious. It's not just the right to free speech that's sacred, but the contemporary journalism industry itself, along with the people and institutions that work in it--the people and institutions that the Newseum celebrates, along with the First Amendment, until the principle and the professionals become one and the same, deserving of equal reverence.
This is a trick we see all the time in Washington. Here businesses try desperately to conflate their own interest with the highest constitutional principles, so that any slight dealt to an industry is portrayed as an injury to freedom itself. Tax the widget makers, and their Washington trade association will issue studies proving that widget taxes are an assault on the right to private property. Occasionally, the industries have a point. With the contemporary news industry, though, the opposite argument is easier to make--especially in the case, for example, of the Gannett newspaper chain, which unofficially sponsored the Newseum and furnished its top officeholders. Gannett is infamous for its bureaucratic lack of imagination, its limp editorial pages, its whoring after political fashion, and especially its predatory business tactics, which have swallowed up dozens of worthy competitors. If Gannett went out of business tomorrow, freedom of expression would probably be enhanced rather than diminished.
Still, I prefer to think of all that the Newseum embodies--the sanctimony, the constitutional preening, the bogus intimations of danger, the religious veneration of saints and their relics--as a defense mechanism. Journalism, seen plain, is not a terribly impressive line of work. Some people do things, other people watch people do things. The news business is for people of the second sort. It's a grubby game. What do journalists do? They call people on the phone, they ask questions, they talk, they type, they read newspapers and magazines and boring government documents, they type some more, they go to one place or another to look at something or other, they jot in their notebooks, they type some more, they think a little, they pause for a minute to sip coffee before they go back to typing. The dough's not very good. The hours are erratic. Most of your colleagues are slobs. You'll never have a proper office unless you become an editor. Your fellow citizens assume you're an arrogant ass.
We should be forgiven if, in compensation, we exaggerate our own importance. We daydream: If this not-very-interesting trade can be elevated into a profession, made to seem dangerous and profound, a delicate flower of the timeless principles of self-government, blessed by patron saints like Cronkite and Murrow and even Thomas Jefferson, then maybe we're not in such a grubby business after all.
Hence the Newseum. It's pretentious and absurd, but it's poignant, too, and, in its way, kind of inspiring. The Newseum is a proof of the inextinguishable hope that forever rises in the breast of every journalist, the long-shot bet that if we just keep asking questions, if we just keep talking and scribbling away, there will always be an audience that needs us, and always someone willing to pay--if not $572 million, then at least 20 bucks a head.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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