What's the news? See it at the Newseum

-- Sam Kittner: The architects said the Newseum exterior’s central glass façade was designed to show the press as a window on the world.In a city full of museums, the Newseum is the new kid on the block. Located at Sixth and Pennsylvania Avenue, just across from the National Gallery of Art, the Newseum is big and bold and flashy like the news industry whose story it tells. Boasting 250,000 feet of exhibition space out of a whopping 643,000 square feet total, the massive Newseum is not shy and, at $20 a pop to visit, is not cheap. Given all the superb free museums in Washington, the steep admission fee might seem a substantial hurdle, but it’s fair to say that the Newseum, which opened April 11, clears it. Billing itself as “the world’s most interactive museum,” one offering a history of news, the Newseum features more theaters, galleries, interactive displays and hands-on exhibits than anyone can fully take in during an afternoon, but it is riveting. It is also heartening. To see passersby on Pennsylvania Avenue slow to a stop to peruse the outdoor display of more than 50 front pages of newspapers from across the United States is to be reminded that newspapers may be ailing but they’re still of interest.

The new Newseum is a high-tech reinvention of the Newseum in Rosslyn, Va., started in the late 1990s by the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan nonprofit created by USA Today founder Al Neuharth to promote “free press, free speech and a free spirit.” True to the mission of the Freedom Forum, the major funder of the Newseum, the 74-foot-high marble façade on the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the new building is inscribed with the first 45 words of the First Amendment. Inside, too, the mission of the museum clearly comes through, both in stirring statements quoted in the orientation film -- “You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom” (Malcolm X) -- and in the exhibitions themselves. On the basement floor, a special exhibition on the Berlin Wall looks at the role radio, newspapers and TV played in disseminating information that undermined the closed and secretive East German regime. On the fourth floor, the Cox First Amendment Gallery examines the five freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment. The Pulliam Family Great Books Gallery displays books and documents important in the history of freedom, including a 1542 printing of the Magna Carta.

-- Newseum/Maria Bryk: The News History Gallery displays the Newseum’s collection of historic newspapers.The Newseum’s $435 million building on Pennsylvania Avenue was designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, the New York-based firm that designed the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark., and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The seven-story glass-sheathed building has drawn mixed reviews, from the sublime to the scathing, with Washington Post writer Roger K. Lewis calling it an “an extraordinary work of architecture” and Jack Shafer of the online magazine Slate calling it “a gilded disaster” and a “monument to journalistic vanity.”

Inside the museum, visitors are confronted with a dramatic 90-foot atrium that opens onto the Ochs Sulzberger Family Great Hall of News. (The Sulzberger family is just one of the many media contributors to the Newseum whose donations are recognized by grand, baronial titles. Time Warner, NBC News, ABC News, Cox, Bloomberg and others all have their names writ large in what seems a journalistic mega-Hall of Fame.)

The Newseum is designed as a top-down experience. After entering the atrium on the ground floor, visitors ascend to the sixth floor, where an outdoor terrace commands terrific views of the Capitol and offers a history of events that have taken place on Pennsylvania Avenue. From there, visitors can tour the gallery devoted to daily front pages from around the world -- each day 80 of the world’s front pages are on exhibit -- or take in the timeline titled “From Smoke Signals to Sagas: A Chronology of Early News Forms,” which begins with the invention of language around 100,000 B.C.

Arguably, the heart of the Newseum is the News History Gallery on Level 5. This displays news books, newssheets and newspapers culled from the Newseum’s collection of more than 35,000 historic newspapers and magazines dating back to 1545. There is fascinating stuff here, whether it’s the 16th-century news sheet bearing an engraved scene depicting the execution of Huguenots in Amboise, France, the Charleston Mercury’s account of South Carolina’s secession in 1860 under the headline “The Union is Dissolved!” or reports on the atomic bomb blasts in 1945.

Here, too, are contemporary newspaper accounts of all the presidential assassinations from Abraham Lincoln to James Garfield to William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. The substance of what’s reported is gripping, but the evolution in newspaper style also holds interest. On April 15, 1865, The New York Herald reported Lincoln’s assassination with multiple smaller headlines stacked underneath the heading “Important!” This obvious broadcasting to the reader of an event’s significance seems quaint and a little comical today, yet a tour of the Newseum shows it to be its own exercise in “Important!” Journalists are accorded respect bordering on reverence -- witness the Journalists Memorial on the third floor, which has the names of reporters, photographers, editors and broadcasters killed while doing their job etched on glass panels along with photographs of them and more information that can be called up from an electronic database. The World News Gallery on the same floor looks at differences in press freedoms around the world and the dangers journalists encounter while reporting.

Museum-goers can visit broadcast studios -- one of them home to ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” filmed live every Sunday -- on Level 3, along with the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery, which traces the evolution of electronic news. One floor below, visitors to the Ethics Center compete in teams to come up with answers to difficult ethical issues journalists confront or tour the NBC News Interactive Newsroom where they can play photojournalist, reporter, photographer, editor or anchor at one of the 48 interactive kiosks.

-- AP Photo/Edwards Adams: Edward Adams’ “Saigon Execution” won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for spot photography.One of the most popular exhibits is the Pulitzer Prize Photographers Gallery, which offers a comprehensive collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs along with interviews with some of the photographers who took them. Some of these offer surprising testimony that changes the context in which one views the photograph. Edward Adams’ iconic photo of a prisoner being executed in 1969 on the streets of Saigon is accompanied by a video of the AP photographer talking about the photograph, which at the time Mr. Adams said he thought nothing about. “I went back to the AP office and I dropped it off. I said I think I got some guy shooting somebody. I went to lunch. So what? It was a war.”

The man pulling the trigger in the photo was Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam’s national police, who would later become a general. The prisoner he shot was a Viet Cong lieutenant who had just shot a South Vietnamese colonel, his wife and six children. The photo became a symbol of the brutality of the Vietnam War and was taken up by the peace movement, but Mr. Adams’ own experience of war tempers the standard reading of it.

“If you’re this general and you just caught this guy after he killed some of your people ... how do you know you wouldn’t have pulled that trigger yourself? You have to put yourself in that situation ... ”

A day after he shot the photo, Mr. Adams said he began to get some glimmer of the effect the photo was having around the world.

“I had no idea of the impact. And I still don’t understand it even today. Gen. Loan, then he was like a colonel. And the whole thing is that picture destroyed his life. And that’s what bothers me more than anything else. ... I’m told the picture did good things, but I don’t want to hurt people either. I really don’t. It really bothers me. That’s not my intention being a photographer. That’s not what I want to do.”

-- Newseum/Maria Bryk: The 9/11 Gallery displays front pages from around the world and looks at how newspapers covered the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States.It’s moments like these when the viewer catches a glimpse of the story behind the story, when the black-and-white photo takes on added depth and shading, that the Newseum seems most valuable.

By turns educational, entertaining, sobering and inspiring, the Newseum offers something for everybody. Kids may enjoy the comics exhibition or the opportunity to grab a mike and step before a camera to play TV reporter; adults will find no end of compelling material to contemplate, whether it’s Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s sad, constricted life -- the cramped, 10-by-12-foot cabin where he lived in rural Montana is one of the artifacts in a temporary exhibition on “G-Men and Journalists” and appears just a different kind of prison cell from the one Mr. Kaczynski now inhabits -- footage of the civil rights movement, or the 16th-century news books that within a month of Luther nailing his 95 theses to the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, spread word of his outrage across Europe.

Does the Newseum commemorate a dying business, as some argue? Maybe so, but like the Taj Mahal to which it’s been compared -- another monument to a fading culture, built in the last days of the British Empire -- it’s still well worth visiting. The Newseum offers a history of news, and in the end the immersion in the complexity of history saves it from the news industry’s own self-aggrandizing bombast. Celebrity journalism is the norm today, and the Newseum is no exception to it, but the deeper message of the Newseum is that the front-page stories are almost always bigger and more engrossing than the person telling them.

Margot Patterson is NCR opinion and arts editor and a staff writer. Her e-mail address is mpatterson@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter August 1, 2008