Washington Newseum stresses individual heroism, downplays economics and social context

My Parka pinched tightly, I plunged into the sleet that battered the pavements of Washington DC in a flash storm and tread down 6th Street. I wasn't about to turn back now. There was no other time for me to take the assortment of extended family members to the Newseum, the exhibit hall about journalism that has garnered so much buzz since its recent move from humble beginnings over the horizon in Virginia to a swank neomodern block with a balcony over looking the Capitol building that generates so much of its subject matter.

The Newseum is an experience worth the entrance fee, and a capacious view into the profession that it honors. The history exhibit boasts history-making front pages throughout the life of our country, and the First Amendment exhibit brought tears to my eyes. But a lot was missing from the Newseum too, and I didn't think the omissions were just something they'll get to later.

The focus of the museum is on the journalist as individual hero, extending to interviews with Pulitzer-winning photographers and an obligatory homage to Edward Morrow. Hard on the heels of the First Amendment exhibit was a memorial to journalists who died in the line of duty, including even an automobile destroyed by a car bomb to underline the dangers they face.

This is all appropriate, but left nothing for the business of journalism, which is key to understanding where it stands today. I tried to count the references to the economics of the field and found about enough to be covered by a two-fingered typist. A panel about William Randolph Hearst mentioned media consolidation, with one sentence criticizing it and another defending it. The history and digital media exhibits mentioned the wave of recent newspaper bankruptcies. Particular ironic was the application of the label "Global Media Diversity" to a panel listing five of the world's largest organizations in an ever-consolidating industry.

It's hard to suppress a hypothesis as to why so little is said here about industry finances and their editorial influence: the museum was largely funded by the very organizations that it would otherwise have to put under its microscope. I issue a challenge, therefore, to the Newseum: exercise the uncompromising investigatory dedication you celebrate in your subjects, and add an exhibit about the changing economics of journalism and the scissors crisis in which it traps its practitioners.

Another understated theme in the Newseum is the effect of journalists on events subsequent to their coverage. Repeatedly, exhibits play up journalists' insight and courage in responding to the urgent issues of their times, but any influence in the other direction is only hinted at. The clearest connection made was Nellie Bly's ground-breaking nineteenth-century exposé of conditions in a New York insane asylum, an assignment that required her to be committed and live the life of an inmate.

Although the history exhibit celebrates African-American journalism in the last decades of slavery and during the post-war Civil Rights movement, it does not bring home to the viewer how the relentless parade of facts and images brought a white American public less jaded than we are today to a conviction that it was time for change. And a lavish Woodstock exhibit fails to point out that coverage of this massive gathering propelled the youth counterculture into the mainstream.

Finally, the museum glosses over the roles of various technologies in changing journalism. It offers live interviews in a TV studio, but only for the vicarious tingle it gives would-be participants. Exhibits on the contributions of Internet technologies, typewriters, and helicopters are skimpy.

Despite my wish that it would go farther, I highly recommend a visit to the Newseum. It offers many issues of our day their due, such as the journalistic rights of bloggers. On the whole, it's the fullest survey I've seen of the state of journalism in our time. If we want journalism to continue to exist outside the museum, we can all line up there to gain a better understanding of the field.