May 8, 2007
SELLING THE FIRST AMENDMENT
The idea of a museum celebrating the Constitution's first amendment guarantee of a free press seems like a great idea, especially if it's one that highlights the great personal costs that can be associated with exercising that freedom. That sounds like what the new Newseum being built in Washington D.C. might offer:
Time magazine’s armored truck from the Balkans, pockmarked with bullet holes, has been hoisted into place. The laptop used by Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Pakistan in 2002, has arrived. So has the vest that Bob Woodruff of ABC was wearing last year when he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
Like the modern media that enjoys those hard-fought and costly freedoms, however, it seems like the Newseum is eager to cheapen, trivialize, and whore itself out for a buck as quick as it possibly can. One of the items also on display will be the bedroom slippers of Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette, who partnered up with a hooker to make her name as a blogger/journalist while helping the hooker sell her book. So, real classy. And nothing shouts freedom of the press like luxury apartments and a Wolfgang Puck restaurant!
The building’s transparent exterior is meant to convey the idea of a free press and an open society. A mammoth rectangle frames the facade, suggesting a television or computer screen that provides what the museum calls a “window on the world.” Visitors enter through a Great Hall of News, where they can see breaking stories on a giant digital “zipper” before setting out on a 1.5-mile path of displays and interactive kiosks. The building, which has seven floors, also contains 135 upscale apartments, Newseum shops and Wolfgang Puck’s three-story restaurant, the Source.
Remember when people used to bitch about the proliferation or growing size of museum gift shops? That was so cute. This isn't a museum about freedom of the press. This is a museum about the media. A big profitable, self-aggrandizing, navel-gazing window into the world of news as business and spectacle. If I were Marianne Pearl, I would ask for my late husband's laptop back.
Tagged: media, newseumPosted by Lexiphane at May 8, 2007 12:02 PM
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