The Newseum

Today, April 11, 2008 there was a ceremony held for the newest resident on Pennsylvania Ave, the Newseum. The Newseum is a $450,000,000 building filled with two state-of-art broadcast studios, exhibits of newspapers, video clips, typewriters, and other treasures one might expect that pertain to the media; several theaters, and the life and breath of every major event in modern and not so modern history throughout the world. This museum contains milestones taken in history as humanity felt it. What once were that morning's headlines now are treasured history.

At first, one might feel it is ironic to place the Newseum in the neighborhood where the media so often sets its sights, at the political capital, where the people that serve there are scrutinized and scolded, exposed and overexposed.   The two groups didn't have a neighborly relation before they were neighbors.  However, the Newseum is a monument not just to the art of media throughout the ages, it is also a monument to a basic and fundamental freedom of our nation, the First Amendment, and then the location chosen for the Newseum seems very fitting. During the opening ceremonies, a bald eagle was released to soar and a giant newspaper was dropped like a stage curtain, celebrating its birthday, both symbols of freedom.

The exhibits inside the Newseum are enough to make any journalist, history buff, or patriot treasure their time spent there. Besides the goldmine of headlines from major news events, they have many small and large exhibits such as "the door" to the Democratic Headquarters, which was broken into during what would become Watergate. The tape is still on the doorknob, now yellowed with age. Were it not for that tape, the break in might not have been discovered and Nixon would not have resigned.

Whatever news event you remember in your life (the assignation of JFK, the horror of 9/11, the day the Berlin Wall came down, the first walk on the moon, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the erroneous headlines that were printed and later proven false) a record of it is there. Wars are extensively covered from one major headline to the next. The monuments you will find there differ from any other source you may have found because these are the first drafts of history, expressed in the tones of the people that lived through it, in the here and now, with no spin, no twist, and no reinterpretation. The headlines are mementos of the day.

The Newseum may not be the first place your child might ask to go on vacation, but it does have many exhibits that older children would enjoy. One such exhibit is a hands-on ethics game that asks players ethical question like the one those that the media must face each day, and their answer to the question directs there course in the game. They also have a studio with a teleprompter where people can broadcast a news report in front of well known backdrops. When you return home, you can get your broadcast off the internet and share it with your friends.

The Newseum sounds like a wonderful place the go. Beyond the expression of words, it is uniquely rich in history mainly because of the volume of words and pictures held within its walls.