Newseum celebrates free press and speech

WASHINGTON -- It makes sense that working journalists and news junkies might want to visit a museum that explores five centuries of news history. But everyone else? As the old saying goes, today's news is tomorrow's birdcage liner.

Standing in the Berlin Wall Gallery of the new $450 million Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, though, even people who have never picked up a newspaper would have a tough time denying how crucial it is that journalists tell their stories. The gallery, designed to explore the role of the media in the Wall's 30-year history, paints a vivid picture of how news and information helped topple a closed and oppressive society.

A timeline of images captures first the desperation many felt when the Wall went up in 1961 (remember the famous Associated Press photo of a defecting East German soldier leaping over a barbed-wire barricade?) and then the joy when the Cold War symbol fell in 1989 (a jubilant crowd celebrates at the Brandenburg Gate).

More powerful still is the ominous 40-foot concrete guard tower that looms over eight 3-ton sections of the original Wall in the exhibit. Topped by a searchlight, it makes clear in a way words cannot why the east face is perfectly clean and the west face is covered with graffiti. It originally stood less than a mile from Checkpoint Charlie.

The 9/11 gallery evokes a similar emotional reaction. In it, the crumpled remains of a 360-foot broadcast antenna tower is displayed where 127 national and international front pages from Sept. 12 blanket an entire wall. ("Bastards!" screams more than one headline.) The antenna was part of the north tower of the World Trade Center before it fell some 1,700 feet to the ground on Sept. 11, 2001. The gallery also includes the tattered cell phone, camera and notebook of free-lance photographer Bill Biggart, the only working journalist who was killed that day, along with some of his last photographs.

Talk about coming face-to-face with news history.

Roughly five times the size of the old Newseum in Rosslyn, Va., which closed in 2002 after a five-year run, this seven-level museum opens to the public on Friday.

It boasts 250,000 square feet of exhibit space, including a 90-foot-tall atrium that's dominated by a 40-by-20-foot high-def TV for broadcasting breaking news and historic news events. Billed as the world's most interactive museum, the Newseum also features 130 stations featuring more than two-dozen interactive programs and more than 27 hours of video.

The museum is funded largely by the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to free speech and free press. Its primary goal, according to Executive Director Joe Urschel, is to present an impartial study of the press system in our and other countries, and how it affects people's lives and their freedoms.

"It's not a Hall of Fame or a monument to the news media," he said, "but really a study of the importance of a free press to a free society."

That theme is reinforced even before you step inside the museum's massive glass doors, or peruse the collection of Today's Front Pages from across the United States -- electronically transmitted to the museum each day by dawn -- that punctuate the facade. A 74-foot tablet on the front of the building wears all 45 words of the First Amendment.

Given that Washington's national museums are free, and that today's news stories are a keystroke away on the Internet, it begs the question why someone would fork over $20 to learn about the media. But truth be told, you get a pretty big (not to mention exhausting) bang for your buck.

In the 7,000-square-foot NBC News Interactive Newsroom, for instance, kids can step before a camera and "report" a news story in front of the White House or Pentagon. They can also try their hand at being a photojournalist, a reporter or an anchor at one of 48 interactive kiosks.

Parents, meanwhile, can play a pair of decision-making games on ethics. (Question: Do you tell your editor the teen-age shoplifter you've been asked to write a story on is your baby sitter?)

Other exhibits speak to the dangerous conditions in which journalists often work. In the World News Gallery, visitors see the bullet-ridden pickup used by Time magazine reporters in Bosnia and Sarajevo. There's also the flak jacket worn by ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff when he was severely injured in a roadside explosion in Iraq in 2006 and the laptop used by slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

A Journalists Memorial pays tribute to the more than 1,800 newspeople who have been killed in the line of duty. It begins with newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy, who in 1837 was shot while trying to protect a printing press from a pro-slavery mob.

Maybe watching the news is more your thing. If so, you'll appreciate the museum's 15 theaters, two broadcast studios (ABC's George Stephanopoulos will tape his Sunday public-affairs show from one) and the 48 32-inch TV monitors embedded into the walls of the Internet, TV and Radio Gallery. Or, take a seat in the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater, where visitors can go undercover with Nellie Bly as she exposes the terrible conditions in a 19th-century insane asylum.

Other galleries are devoted to the First Amendment; Early News (pre-15th century); and News History. The museum's largest gallery, it includes more than 30,000 historic newspapers tracing more than 500 years of news.

Visitors also can read from a 1475 printing of Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica" in the Great Books Gallery, and view the largest and most comprehensive collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalism ever assembled.

You can't see it all in one day, of course, and maybe not even in a week. And you'll definitely need to refresh yourself along the way in the food court, which is catered by Wolfgang Puck. But Urschel hopes you'll walk away with a better appreciation of why news is important, as well as a deeper understanding that the protections the First Amendment provides are rights everyone owns, even those who hold the media in low esteem.

As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1864 while president, and displayed from one of the museum's walls: "Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe."

(Gretchen McKay can be reached at gmckay(at)post-gazette.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)