ON A GRAY, DRIZZLY SPRING DAY in Washington DC, the best and warmest spot to be in is what is touted to be the most interactive museum in the world today— the Newseum, short for News Museum. And the best companion for this first visit is a world-weary University of the Philippines journalism professor looking for affirmation that he, and by extension the newspaper he’s been serving for 15 years, have not become obsolete.
A little mix-up occurs at the ticketing counter. Friend Benjamin Abellera, who teaches 11th graders in DC, is nowhere in the lobby where a Bell Jet Ranger news chopper swings from the atrium. Later I find out he had been going around the museum exterior on the chance that we might have gone in through a side entrance.
Meanwhile, the prof buys our tickets for $20 each (a little pricey, considering that at nearby Smithsonian museums, the Library of Congress, the Capitol and the National Art Gallery on the National Mall, you can get in free). Benjie writes in an earlier e-mail that this is his treat. A Filipino staffer sorts things out, returns the prof’s money and says, “Don’t forget me! My name is Lucy David.”
Uhmm. This must be what they call a delayed lead.
If there’s anything the Newseum and 30-plus years of newspaper and freelance work have taught me, it’s that broadcast media get all the facts of a news story immediately; newspapers are left to fill in the “boring details,” to use humorist Dave Barry’s words. And as the prof likes to point out, the days of the inverted pyramid structure of the news story are over. For newspapers to continue to exist and be of interest to a declining number of readers, the way to go is to use skillful storytelling, narrative, creative nonfiction.
The museum literally enshrines the First Amendment to the US Constitution on its façade on Pennsylvania Avenue. Etched in marble, the 75-foot tablet that can be read from hundreds of meters away carries these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The journey begins at the concourse level where we are herded into an orientation theater to watch a short documentary on what is news. The late journalist-professor Armando J. Malay would have been pleased with the light, sound and pictures worth a semester of lectures. I emerge with Madonna’s words ringing in my ears: “Freedom of the press is better than sex.”
At the same level stand eight 12-foot high sections of the former Berlin Wall, weighing three tons and acquired in 1994. Behind is a pictorial narrative of how and why the wall went up, what risks East Germans took to escape to the West, the softening of the Soviet Union and the exuberant celebration as people brought hammers, bludgeons, ice picks, shovels and other tools to bring down the Wall.
Next stop is another documentary theater where a 4-D short film extols the trails blazed by Nellie Bly, who antedated the term “investigative journalism” by going undercover in a women’s insane asylum and writing about the abuses there, and Edward Murrow, who broadcast on the blitzkrieg from an unknown rooftop in London, among others. Never is there a dull moment as viewers, wearing 3-D glasses, scream as a bullet seems to hit them between the eyes, as a rat seems to scurry between their legs and real drops of water hit their glasses or faces when the contents of a basin are flung from the screen.
From the concourse, the tour takes us up to the sixth level via glass express elevators, then we slowly work our way to the first floor. The sixth level features a terrace from where we get purportedly “one of the best views of the Capitol” and an exhibition of early news (text about smoke signals, sagas, etc.). In a way the elements that constitute news have remained unchanged: birth/death, war/peace, victory/defeat, crime/punishment, love/hate, wisdom/ignorance, truth/lies, discovery/loss, wealth/poverty, harvest/drought, destruction/invention and loyalty/betrayal.
I linger longest on the fifth floor where there’s an exhibition of great books that can be opened interactively with the touch of a finger on the computer monitor. These books are credited for defending “freedom to publish as essential to moral and intellectual development.” There are several pull-out trays with reproductions of newspaper pages covering 500 years.
I randomly press on names, familiar and not, on various computer screens. I learn that Harry Caray broadcast that famed expression “Holy cow!” – prompting others to invent a “signature style.”
Melissa Ludtke, a Sports Illustrated reporter, demanded equal access to the New York Yankees’ locker room in 1977. In 1978, a court ruling decreed that it was unconstitutional to ban a woman from a male athletes’ locker room.
Gloria Steinem, a founder of Ms. Magazine, is quoted as saying that “Feminism isn’t responsible for divorce. Marriage is.” She and other women writers are acknowledged for opening doors for other women who were then at the margins of the news profession. When they broke the ceiling, there were “no more girl jobs and boy jobs in news.”
The legendary Tina Brown, toast of lifestyle and magazine editors for taking over Vanity Fair and later New Yorker and increasing these magazines’ circulation but later failing with Talk, says, “Magazines are not churches. I believe in the pleasure principle.” Computer scientist Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he did not make money from it, just like Gutenberg who invented the printing press. Their point was that their inventions were meant for everybody.
The ethics center on the second level has more interactive displays that enable the visitor to make a judgment call on such issues as: Is it right to masquerade as a mental patient to know what goes on in an institution? Should a photographer aim for that Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of a helpless, malnourished Sudanese child, with a vulture hovering nearby, instead of practicing compassion by picking up the child and bringing him to the nearest feeding center?
There are no black and white answers to these issues. The professor is shaken up and voices a thought bubble that the paradigms he has lived with have been overhauled. True to form, a day’s tour is not enough for him. Benjie, kind soul, senses this and gives him another ticket to ride.
Copyright 2009 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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