Freedom of the Press Moguls

Tag : cartoon slippers

The Newseum, the latest addition to Washington’s sprawling,preening, self-singing monument-memorial complex, may boast aconstitutional amendment engraved on its $450 million façade,and an outsized collection of press arcana, but it beckons to thevisitor in the same fashion that the nightly news does to thesuburban homeowner: You go downstairs and watch TV. Or rather, youbegin your tour at the Hearst Corporation-sponsored OrientationTheater at the concourse level, opposite the Wolfgang Puck-cateredfood court.
However — since I follow directions poorly — I sit downin the wrong theater. It is showing a glowing retrospective onsports journalism, and it takes me some time to realize my error.The hero hymned on screen is Roone Arledge — the famousformer director of ABC’s sports coverage, who seamlesslytransitioned into the network’s news director. Perhaps, Ithink, we are watching thecorporate-newsmasters-of-indeterminate-portfolio segment of thedocumentary “What Is News?”
However, after a verbally mangled paean to Arledge’s titanicgenius — former ABC sportscaster Jim McKay says that“the words, ‘the thrill of victory and the agony ofdefeat’ ” (the slogan Arledge dreamt up for“ABC’s Wide World of Sports”) had “become,literally, part of our language” — we segue into asegment on how the Olympics makes news, and I sense a patternemerging.
So I’m off to the real Orientation Theater, sure that it willdivulge the real nature of news.
I am soon oriented toward the core belief that news is made up ofmind-numbingly banal binary oppositions: Birth/Death; War/Peace;Hate/Love. On-screen commentators offer up similar anodyneformulas, as does our voice-over narrator, “CBS MorningNews” anchor Charles Osgood. He strings together sonoroussyllogisms that signify very nearly nothing, e.g. “Facts comefirst, then ideas, then ideals,” and “Information iswhere liberty starts.”
Such billowing wordplay isn’t coming across, literally, aspart of our language. Still, as the lights come up, it sets off onenearby patron.
“I like how they have all this leftist propaganda,”sneers a guy in knee-length checkered shorts and a West Virginiabaseball cap.
At the computer kiosk outside Orientation Theater it dawns on methat my pedestrian quest for literal meaning is missing theNewseum’s main point: It is not a memorial to news, ornewsgathering, but, rather, a lavish, atrium-enhanced, multiscreenadvertisement that extols slogans, personalities and — mostof all — the concept of press ownership. For here at thetouchscreen kiosk, visitors can imbibe every Hearst-brandedcelebration … of the Hearst brand. In a filmed statement, thecompany CEO praises his corporation’s excellent taste inpartnering with the Newseum. A different button yields a tourthrough Hearst Corp.’s many media properties. Yet anothergives a history of the company’s excellent track record ofmedia consolidation.
Since I’m a former Hearst employee, I’m eager to seehow the mother company — which in 2000 offloaded its flagshipproperty, the San Francisco Examiner , six years after a bitter strike paralyzed it for months —is gilding its past for the Newseum crowd.
We learn that the company launched itself into the modern news erawhen media mogul William Randolph Hearst took control of the Examiner from his dad in 1887. We catch a discreet reference to the elderHearst being elected to the U.S. Senate, but there’s littlemention of William’s colorful political interests: his roleplumping for the imperialist Spanish-American War, or his lengthy,vicious career as strike-breaker and Red-baiter.
Instead, we get a drumbeat recitation of the properties Hearstacquired, and the technological domains he conquered: “By the1920s, Hearst had 28 newspapers nationwide.”
His papers were the first to feature color comics!
He bought up magazines by the bushelful!
Radio stations, too!
So it is throughout the Newseum’s 250,000 square feet ofexhibition space. We see a distinct premium placed on the newsindustry’s largeness, and precious little recognition of itspurpose.
Oh, there is, of course, plenty of First Amendment talk, and fondlooks back at when journalists clashed with notions of executivebranch prior restraint. But for all the heroic talk of thepress’ role in preserving liberty and democracy,there’s no reckoning with the overtly political ends that acommercial press pursues.
Even less is there any examination of why we have a commercialpress in the first place, or how frenetic consolidation of mediaproperties disfigures the public’s stake in journalism.
When you take the elevator up to the fifth floor and work your waydown the vast exhibition areas, for instance, you first encounteran exhibition on News History (mislabeled, in a Huxley-esque typoon a sign next to the elevator, “New History”). There,the kiosk-vertisement is for NewsCorp, which had the vision tograce the unsuspecting world with Fox News.
Guiding us through the many, many holdings of NewsCorp is Fox Newscorrespondent Shepard Smith. He reports with the barest undertoneof televisual-approved irony that he and the doltish“Simpsons” newsbot Kent Brockman are “employed bythe same company.”
Then we get the same, potted history of Rupert Murdoch’svulgar news-conquering ways that we saw in Hearstland: “Itall began,” Shepard reverently intones, “with oneman’s dedication to the news.” New History, indeed.
In the accompanying exhibit, we see many more broad-stroke slogans:“News Helps Incite Rebellion” for the Revolutionary War— a period safely distant enough in time for popular dissentto be treated as a virtue. For abolitionism, a strangely moredetached slogan: “Slavery Divides a Nation.” By theonset of World War II, we are again at the point ofbagginess-beyond-signification. “The Story of the CenturyUnfolds: War Was, and Is, Big News.” You don’t say.
Tucked into a back wall display there’s a small exhibit underthe heading “Who Owns What”? Here we learn that“Mergers and Takeovers Create Multimedia Giants.” Theexplanatory text, like in many of the museum displays, isirritatingly highlighted in fake yellow marker, as if put togetherby a bored and distracted college sophomore. Here the discerningyellow mark falls on the did-you-know factoid that Disney, onceknown for cartoon renderings of cuddly mice, is today “amultimedia conglomerate that typifies the changing face of newsmedia ownership.”
And how do such incongruities come to pass? Read on, dear visitor:“Today, chances are that your daily newspaper — oncelocally owned — is owned by a large company in a city manymiles away. Likewise for your network television affiliates. Why?Because the news media yield profit and power.” Youdon’t say.
Elsewhere, the sophomoric highlighting becomes pernicious. In alook back at 19th century “Press Barons,” thehighlighted text reads “Publishers and editors of the eracould fight corruption and influence government policy.”That’s nice. But below, in unhighlighted, boring black-andwhite, we learn that “many of them used (or abused) thatpower to promote their own agendas.” A social universe,crammed into a two-word parenthetical.
That indignity was compounded by the aphorism our sophomore curatorselected for the display, A.J. Liebling’s old saw aboutfreedom of the press being guaranteed only to those who own one.This, so far as I could tell, was Liebling’s only appearancein the cavernous display areas — and small wonder, since heheld all press owners and publishers in principled contempt. Theplace would have greatly benefited from his far sturdier aphorismabout the press’ mission being to comfort the afflicted andafflict the comfortable, but perhaps the Newseum curators ran outof wallspace after carving “Free speech not only lives, itrocks!” — the sober appraisal of “televisionpersonality” Oprah Winfrey after her 1998 acquittal on libelcharges when she dared cast doubt on the safety of the Americanhamburger.
The Newseum spectacle doesn’t end there, of course: A guardtower and cement segments of the Berlin Wall (Cold War makes news,too, you see); part of an immolated tower from the 9/11 attacks(“hate,” you recall, is part of what makes news);interactive studios where visitors can pretend to be newscasters.(Disclosure: My wife, the blogger formerly known as Wonkette,donated a pair of her slippers to the place. Curators asked for herpajamas, but she struck a rare blow for Newseum tastefulness inonly vouchsafing them footwear).
Of the “4-D” time-travel movie through “thedigital news stream,” the less said the better, save thatcandor compels me to report that the experience left me feeling noyounger; indeed, quite the opposite.
No, the most lasting takeaway from my Newseum tour came the nextmorning, when I absently tuned in to ABC’s “This WeekWith George Stephanopoulos,” in masochist search of moreelection-driven pundit blather. I learned, to my shock, that theshow is now permanently housed in the Newseum studio. To my furtherastonishment, after one commercial cutaway, we saw B-roll tape withthe show’s logo emblazoned on a banner right next to thestone-carved rendering of the First Amendment on thefacility’s only concrete exterior wallspace.
What is sponsoring what is, in other words, anybody’sguess.