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February 27, 2005

The Newseum's Strategies for Relegitimizing Journalism in the Information Age

From Heroic Objectivity to the News Stream: The Newseum’s Strategies for Relegitimizing Journalism in the Information Age

Ted Friedman Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15:3 (September, 1998).

Introduction

The Newseum, “the world’s only interactive museum of news,” opened its doors in Arlington, Virginia in April of 1997. Combining historical exhibits, high-tech spectacle, and the manic ambiance of a busy shopping mall, the Newseum is state-of-the-art “edutainment.” Built at a cost of $50 million (Freedom Forum, 1998b), the Newseum is free to the public. It’s the project of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation with close ties to the Gannett Company, one of America’s largest media corporations.

In an era when, according to one survey, “two out of three members of the public [have] nothing or nothing good to say about the media” (Times Mirror Center for People and the Press, 1995)(1), the Newseum aims to spruce up the image of journalism. As founder Al Neuharth puts it, “By taking visitors behind the scenes, we hope to forge a deeper understanding of the role of news and a free press in our lives” (Freedom Forum Online, 1998). What exactly that role is supposed to be, however, is a tricky question to answer, and the frenzy with which the Newseum assaults the visitor attests to the ongoing legitimation crisis in American journalism.

The professional status and public authority of contemporary American journalism is grounded in the doctrine of “objectivity.” Objectivity insists that facts can be separated from values, and that the proper role of the media is to sort, verify, and deliver those “unbiased” facts to readers. A critical function of the ideology of objectivity is to render invisible the press’s power to shape and reinforce public opinion and cultural standards. Objectivity asks us to think of the media not as an independent influence on American life, but only the transparent transmitter of already-existing information. As with baseball umpires, you shouldn’t notice reporters as long as they’re doing their jobs right. As Michael Schudson (1995) has pointed out, this accounts for the invisibility of journalism in conventional American historiography.(2) Most narratives of American history assume the role of the news is simply to transmit information; the real historical actors are supposed to be the subjects about whom reporters write.

This helps explain why the United States has never has a major press museum before the opening of the Newseum. It’d be like an umpires’ museum - what would you show besides the mistakes? But it’s not hard to see why the Freedom Forum concluded a press museum is now needed to bolster journalism’s sagging cultural capital. At this point in our information-saturated age, ignoring the media is like ignoring the elephant in your living room. The very success which has made the media so ubiquitous - and financially lucrative - has eroded its claims to professional authority. It’s no longer credible to treat the press as simply an invisible messenger. Postmodern culture trains viewers to notice the medium as well as the message. Take, for example, the celebritization of network news. The high profile of superstar newscasters like Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer has made them more marketable, but at the same time less credible as “objective” reporters who can be relied upon to subordinate their individual opinions to a depersonalizing professional method. It’s no wonder, then, that the fantasy of objectivity is under siege from all sides, as the press is regularly accused of “bias” from both the left and the right. The legitimizing narrative of journalism is breaking down. Viewers may still watch, read, and listen to the news, but they respect it less (McAneny & Saad, 1997; Fallows, 1996).

In the face of this predicament, any relegitimation project has two options: to refurbish objectivity so that it can stand the scrutiny of a media-savvy public, or to move beyond objectivity altogether. The Newseum attempts both strategies.

The Newseum’s version of objectivity gives up on the ideal of invisibility, acknowledging that the press is a large, influential institution in American life. Rather than mystifying the press by hiding its work, it mythologizes the press by turning reporters into heroic freedom fighters (Reese, 1997). That’s still kosher under the values of objectivity, because the process of transmission remains transparent and “value-free.” What’s heroic is the act of transmission itself. There’s a contradiction to this fantasy of heroic objectivity, though. Systems of objectivity are designed to subordinate individual autonomy to depersonalizing professional technique, in order to guarantee standardized, reproducible results. The Newseum attempts to gloss over this problem by highlighting the achievements of exceptional figures such as Woodward and Bernstein. But, as we shall see, when the Newseum’s focus shifts from mythic history to the ordinary experiences of everyday reporters, the contradictions in the heroic model of objectivity begin to seep through.

In the age of satellites and the Internet, of course, the mechanics of transmission are changing rapidly. The proliferation of instant, globally accessible news sources, in fact, offers the utopian promise of a way out of the compromises of objectivity. As the cramped column space of the newspaper is replaced by the unlimited bandwidth of the World Wide Web, perhaps univocal objectivity can give way to a polyphonous public sphere. Rather than journalists sorting through information to cull kernels of fact, viewers and readers could become empowered to more directly engage and assess information. As the Newseum struggles to transcend the constraints of objectivity, it offers occasional glimpses of this vision of a free, unmediated flow of information, what it calls “the news stream.” But, we will discover, this utopian vision runs into its own problems.

The Newseum is a dazzling, disorienting, and self-contradicting institution. What lends this confusion a modicum of coherence is the narrative imposed by the building’s design. Visitors can’t simply wander from room to room, as in a traditional museum. Instead, new arrivals are quickly deposited on the top floor of the museum, and must follow a single path weaving through each exhibit in order to get back to the entrance. The path is roughly chronological: after an introductory video, the tour begins with the News History Gallery, representing journalism’s past. From there, it’s on to the Video News Wall, which captures the immediate present with live feeds from an array of all-news channels. Finally, you end up in the futuristic Interactive Newsroom, a riot of multimedia computers and participatory activities. The chronological development of the Newseum roughly coincides with its ideological development, as well: while the early sections lay out the model of heroic objectivity, the high-tech exhibits move on to the utopian vision of the news stream. To capture the experience of stumbling through the Newseum, this essay will follow the building’s structure, walking through each exhibit in order. The Newseum is jam-packed with information, so this analysis will be far from complete. But I’ll try to hit all the highlights.

The Freedom Forum and the Gannett Company

Before beginning our walkthrough, a little more background is in order. The Newseum’s sponsor, the Freedom Forum, is a nonprofit foundation “dedicated to a free press, free speech, and free spirit for all people” (Freedom Forum, 1998a). Formerly the Gannett Foundation, the Freedom Forum is now an independent organization, but close ties remain. The Forum and the Newseum were founded by Al Neuharth, inventor of Gannett’s USA Today, and the Newseum’s directors are all Gannett veterans. The Newseum building itself sits just across the street from the twin towers housing the offices of Gannett and USA Today.(3)

In addition to USA Today, Gannett runs a chain of over 90 daily newspapers, 20 television stations, and assorted other multimedia properties throughout the United States (Hoover’s Online, 1998). In a time when, out of the approximately 1700 newspapers in the U.S., 1600 operate without direct competition from another paper (Motley Fool, 1997), Gannett’s predatory business practices have clearly contributed to the demise of the multi-paper town. A favored Gannett strategy is to buy one newspaper in a two-paper market, then use its deep pockets and leverage with advertisers to drive the smaller paper out of business (McCord, 1996).

The Freedom Forum, unsurprisingly, takes a sunnier view toward media monopoly. As we shall see, the rhetoric of the news stream suggests that American information sources have never been more diverse. A display in the news gallery titled “TV giants go global” more precisely explains, “Critics fear conglomerates will boost profits by cutting news quality or using their news outlets to promote their other businesses. Executives say the size of their corporations helps them stand up to governments that would control news.” Left unasked is the question of who will be able to stand up to the corporations, especially in a one-paper town. In addition, the global scope of media corporations may in fact have the opposite effect on their international coverage, encouraging them to avoid criticism of any country in which they may wish to do business. The seems to be the case in several recent controversies over Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp’s coverage of China.(4)

A second controversial aspect of the Gannett Company is its labor practices. Employees at the Detroit News, alongside workers for Knight-Ridder’s Detroit Free Press, recently ended a bitter 19-month strike, although litigation continues. Recent court rulings have blamed Gannett and Knight-Ridder for provoking the strike through unfair labor practices (AP, 1997a). Inside the Newseum, coverage of the tumultuous history of labor relations in the news industry is almost entirely absent. The technologies of news reproduction are proudly displayed, but the workers behind these processes - pressmen, delivery drivers, fiber-optic cable layers - are made invisible. At the opening of the Newseum, however, labor made itself visible, as Teamsters picketed the building, chanting “Sanitized! Anesthetized! Homogenized!” (Featherstone, 1998) The literature they passed out questioned the lack of media coverage of the Detroit strike, asking, “Does Gannett Buy Silence?” (Featherstone, 1998) Their questions, perhaps, were answered the next day: almost all coverage of the Newseum’s opening ignored the protests.(5)

Entering

With a sense of the museum’s institutional context, then, let’s now look more closely at the site itself. Somewhat like the Gannett Corporation itself, the Newseum is an amorphous entity, difficult to cognitively map. From the outside, its principal recognizable feature is a white dome, titled at an angle to suggest an astronomically accurate globe. But the globe does not actually enclose the entire museum, only a giant-screen high-definition TV theater. The bulk of the Newseum actually spills over into the lower floors of an adjacent 18-story office building, which dwarfs the four-story high globe. While the Newseum’s exterior looks pretty impressive in promotional close-ups, in person it seems awkwardly shoehorned into the corporate neighborhood.

The globe motif continues inside the Newseum. From the entrance lobby, you catch your first glimpse of the News Globe, a giant mesh sphere made up of the interconnected logos of 1,841 newspapers from around the world. A globe, of course, is a traditional newspaper icon, from the Boston Globe to Superman’s fictional Daily Planet. The twist in the News Globe is that it’s a patchwork of many papers; rather than suggesting that one single paper “covers the globe,” it represents the decentered, worldwide process of newsgathering - an early hint of the ideal of the news stream. The internationalist message is echoed along the back wall of the lobby’s information desk, where the word “news” is translated into over 50 languages. As we shall see, however, this internationalism is whittled down in scope as the visitor walks through the Newseum.

Behind the information desk sits the News Bytes Cafe, a “cybercafe” and snack shop serving a limited menu of coffee, hot dogs, and Web sites. The six available computers are installed with custom browsers linking the user to “selected news sites on the World Wide Web.” The custom Freedom Forum mousepads carry the foundation’s slogan, “Free Press, Free Speech, Free Spirit.” The surfing experience, however, tells a different story. Not only is no keyboard available to enter web addresses, but all sites beyond the sanctioned news areas are disabled, so that you can’t click on hyperlinks to explore futher information on other web sites. Presumably, the Newseum is afraid of randy visitors browsing pornographic sites, but the irony is telling. Throughout the Newseum, the cry of “Freedom” is a constant refrain, the value in the name of which journalists so heroically struggle. But the museum’s definition of “freedom” is strictly circumscribed to mean “freedom from government control of the press.” Broader understandings of freedom - such as concern over the ability of powerful non-governmental institutions to restrict access to information - are beyond the purview of the Newseum.

“What’s News?”

From the first floor lobby, escalators lead up to the Newseum’s second level. Guides encourage visitors to begin their trip with a visit to the HDTV theater. The introductory videos play every 20 minutes; between showings, visitors can browse in the adjacent Newseum store. The theater is the interior side of the giant globe. The design is similar to that of the many IMAX theaters that have become popular tourist spots in recent years, and as at IMAX theaters, the film is designed to highlight the spectacle made possible with this cutting-edge technology.

As the film designed to introduce visitors to the Newseum, you might expect “What’s News” to summarize the history of journalism, or perhaps to introduce the basics of “the five Ws.” The video, however, takes a much more impressionistic approach, using a montage of news footage arrayed in various split-screen combinations to illustrate “timeless” news subjects. These include Firsts, War, Peace, Breakthroughs, Life, Death, Love, Hate, Sacrifice, and Freedom. Death, for example, is illustrated by snippets of JFK and Martin Luther King; Hate, by Hitler and the KKK. As Stephen D. Reese (1997) notes, “the film depicts news as part of the never-ending cycles of war and peace, love and hate, life and death. By inviting the viewer to regard news within a context of natural cycles, news becomes an organically necessary and unproblematic feature of society - as natural as life and death and the basis for all else (p. 17).(6)

The final two categories are particularly significant. When the narrator gets to “Sacrifice,” a subtle shift occurs. From news topics, the focus changes to news gathering. The subjects of the “sacrifice” section are not heroic figures in general, but specifically journalists who risk their lives to bring you all the images the video’s been displaying. This emphasis on the courage of journalists is a pervasive theme at the Newseum, reiterated most forcefully at Freedom Journalists’ Memorial in Freedom Park, which honors journalists who have died in the line of duty, listing each reporter’s name in the style of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. What is it that these journalists have sacrificed for? “Freedom,” the final category of “What’s News,” symbolized by a giant image of the Statue of Liberty.

The video isn’t exactly “objective” in the traditional sense, as images are arranged to serve a message of uplift rather than to provide value-free information. But the video gets away with its proselytizing, because the virtue it ultimately celebrates, “freedom,” is presented less as an independent value than as the necessary condition to make value-free reporting possible. Freedom, then, is a kind of meta-value, and can be celebrated without compromising journalistic objectivity. But the Newseum vision of freedom is not as independent from other values and judgments as “What’s News?” implies. Freedom can be defined in more than one way - and, as we have seen, the Newseum’s definition distinctly constricts the notion of freedom. It’s also no accident that “What’s News?” ends with the image of the Statue of Liberty, identifying freedom not just as a universal value, but as a distinctly American one. This nationalistic undercurrent runs beneath the internationalist rhetoric of the Newseum, suggesting that while the news may be global, America deserves pride of place as first among equals.(7)

The News Gallery

The HDTV Theater deposits exiting visitors on Level III, the top floor of the Newseum. Here begins the News Gallery, a collection of artifacts and exhibits documenting the history of news. At the entrance to the gallery appears this introduction: “News, ancient and universal, fills a basic human need: the need to know.” Following this universalist dictum, the gallery emphasizes the continuity between early information-gathering practices and what we know as “news” today. Customs as diverse as drumming, smoke signaling, and griot storytelling are all collapsed into a single, uniform process: “Around campfires, our earliest ancestors trade stories. At ancient crossroads, they spread the word. News - spoken, sounded, written, printed - helps early societies grow into civilizations.”

Of particular interest are a series of displays in which, as the Newseum puts it, “a timeless question is posed for each era designed to challenge visitors to examine current news issues in a historical framework” (Freedom Forum, 1998c). In the 1920s section, for example, the story of a reporter who snuck a camera into an execution to photograph the moment of electrification is presented under the heading, “Do tabloids go too far?” The problem with this approach is that it breaks the first rule of historiography: it judges the past by the standards of the present, rather than attempting to understand the past on its own terms. While the questions themselves are admirably probing - “Is seeing believing?” “Whose news is it?” and so on - their critical edge is dulled by the simplistic equation of the past with the present.

This ahistoricism is particularly egregious in early displays: under the heading “What Makes News?,” 15th Century accounts of Columbus’s voyage are used to explain what makes a contemporary story newsworthy. The “newsbooks” of the era, the display claims, “carry the same news we see today: war, crime, and lives of the royally famous.” This universalizing, essentialist definition of news - this assumption that there is some Platonic form of “news” which remains unchanging in any social formation - elides the radical differences between contemporary news media and earlier forms of information distribution. In its effort to shape 15th Century practices into 20th Century norms, the Columbus display downplays the information that what the newsbooks contained were not independent accounts of events, but reprints of Columbus’s own letters (Stephens, 1997). Journalism simply hadn’t been invented yet.

In fact, as Schudson (1995) convincingly argues, the very category of “news” as Americans know it today did not exist until it was invented by the penny press in the 1830s. Before then, “newspapers” operated under very different assumptions of purpose and audience. Schudson gives compelling examples of how alien to our sensibilities earlier standards of “news” seem:

The first paper to last any length of time in America was the Boston NewsLetter published by John Campbell. Campbell … had a sense of his project quite different from our own sense of news. He saw his task as the recording of recent history. He wanted to keep his reports in chronological order, but because of little space and occasional suspension of publication, he could not print all the news he received from London. He got further and further behind. By 1718 he was printing news that was a year old, and he began to print more frequently to make up for this. The idea of skipping to the most recent events did not occur to him. Nor, certainly, did he think to focus on local, rather than London, news (Schudson, 1995, p. 45).

Another early paper, Samuel Keimer’s Pennsylvania Gazette, planned to print serially Ephraim Chapber’s Cyclopaedia, from A to Z. When Ben Franklin bought it a year into the project, it was still on the A’s (Schudson, 1995). The Newseum’s essentialism robs the past of this kind of strangeness and specificity, making every historical era a simple precursor to our own.

Essentialism does have its pedagogic advantages. Fitting unfamiliar forms to a common template encourages visitors to make the imaginative leap of picturing themselves in another era. But more significantly, essentialism is a powerful legitimizing strategy, casting the contemporary news media as the logical culmination and rightful inheritor of a rich historical legacy.

The history of information-gathering, however, is too unruly to easily fit into such a neatly teleological narrative. And so, the News Gallery does contain moments of contradiction. Occasionally, the question displays serve to highlight the differences rather than the continuities between past and present. A display on the press during the American Revolution, for example, asks “Should journalists take sides?” The text explains, “Patriot journalists don’t tell both sides of the story. They tell one side - their side. They are not ‘objective’ journalists. They are revolutionaries.” In this case, the historical example effectively uses the difference of the past to interrogate the present; if advocacy journalism was good enough for the American Revolutionaries, maybe it still has something to offer. The text quickly reincorporates this implicit critique of objectivity into its teleological narrative, however. Advocacy journalism is destined to move off the front pages on to more appropriate forums: “This mix of news and opinion … will eventually find its way into editorial pages, talk radio and the Internet.” This language loads the display’s original question, “Should journalists take sides?” by assuming that “news” and “opinion” are independent, separable qualities. Left unasked is the question, “Is it possible for journalists not to take sides?”

Other contradictions rise to the surface as the gallery nears the present. For the most part, the gallery follows a familiar narrative, what has been dubbed “the Whig theory of the history of technology” (Segal, 1994; Staudenmaier, 1985; Kranzberg, 1990), which automatically equates technological progress with social progress. The gallery comfortably treats each technological advance, from papyrus to the printing press to the linotype, as another blow for freedom. But when we reach the age of television, a note of anxiety creeps into the triumphal rhetoric. A display on news in the 1960s defensively asks, “Is TV really superficial?” Within the framework of heroic objectivity, the News Gallery can only answer with a qualified no. While the text below the question explains how “moving pictures add drama [and] impact,” it also warns us, “Even top anchor Walter Cronkite advises viewers to read newspapers.” This isn’t surprising advice from a media corporation that owns even more newspapers than TV stations. But it does suggest the difficulty of fitting television into a comfortable narrative of progress. The values of objectivity - even heroic objectivity - are rooted in a model which takes the newspaper as the archetypal news form. It is print’s anonymity and distance from the events it describes which allows it to transform raw data into “objective” information. Image-oriented journalists can mimic the codes of objectivity, but their ability to directly record information narrows the opportunity for critical distance. The Newseum’s way out of this problem, we shall see, is to move beyond the print-oriented standard of objectivity, to an ideal that celebrates the immediacy of unmediated information.

The News Video Wall

The News Gallery questions end on a note of exhaustion, asking of the information-rich 1990s, “Is it all too much?” While the text below seems hard pressed for a reassuring answer, around the corner, the next section of the Newseum responds in a giddy affirmative, in the form of the cacophonous, colossal News Video Wall, a 126-foot row of nine giant television screens tuned to an array of news channels. A caption on a side wall explains the ideal behind the display in rhapsodic postmodern language:

Every few seconds, millions of words, sounds and images flash around the globe. This is the news stream, the endless flow of fresh data, events, issues and ideas, that give us our picture of the world. In the digital age, the news stream is growing beyond measure. News comes faster, from all directions. The video news wall lets you look into the news steam to see today’s news as it happens.

The wall is the Newseum’s technological centerpiece, a vision of the public sphere as panopticon, in which all the world seems to be at your fingertips. Al Gore, speaking at the Newseum’s unveiling, remarked, “I feel like I’m standing on the captain’s deck of the Starship Enterprise” (AP, 1997b), but the wall even more closely resembles that quintessential fantasy of high-tech surveillance, the villain’s lair in a James Bond movie. The difference here is that the video news wall promises that everyone (or at least everyone with cable) can share Goldfinger’s privileged vantage point, viewing all the important events of the world, unmediated, as they happen.

I should clarify that the Newseum does not explicitly distinguish this ideal of the news stream from traditional objectivity. The wall’s caption suggests there has always been a “news stream”; the difference in the digital age is only one of degree. The very metaphor of a news stream, in fact, naturalizes the historical and contingent processes of information delivery. But it’s important to emphasize how different this vision of the news is from the traditional ideal of objectivity. Objectivity is univocal: it delegates to media institutions the job of sifting through myriad and conflicting sources of information to develop a single version of the truth. The ideal of the news stream, however, suggests that the greater bandwidth of new information technologies can allow the media to simply deliver unmediated information, and let the viewer sort through it all by flipping channels - or even watching them simultaneously, on the video news wall.

Of course, what the video news wall offers is only the fantasy of total surveillance. What’s actually striking, on observation, is how similar the channels are. On the day I was watching, the channels on display included Fox News, CNBC, C-SPAN, MSNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, the All-News Network, Telenoticias, and a German news channel. Out of nine channels, seven were English-language American networks, and those seven were the products of only four different media companies. During my visit in February of 1998, the Lewinsky scandal was in full swing, and dominated coverage on the majority of the channels. The perspectives among the channels didn’t vary much, either: each channel displayed the familiar cast of pundits and spokespersons, repeating the same information and analysis.

The vision of a news stream clashes with journalism’s continuing standards of objectivity. Because each individual network continues to strive for “balance,” they all end up looking much the same. As Bruce Springsteen (1992) put it, there’s 57 channels and there’s nothing on. Rather than a truly polyphonous public sphere, the Video Wall is an exercise in overdetermination. In its claim to survey the whole world, it effaces the choices which so drastically limit its scope. Nonetheless, the vision of a news stream does offer the utopian hope of a way out of the traps of objectivity. Staring at the news wall, you can imagine a future in which news institutions, freed from the responsibility of having the first, last, and only word on every subject, might specialize and diversify, and viewers really could be provided with a truly broad range of information sources.

The Interactive Newsroom

At the ends of the walkway across from the Video Wall, stairs lead down to the final section of the Newseum, the Interactive Newsroom. “Interactivity” entails two kinds of activities at the Newseum. Touchscreen computer systems allow visitors to make choices and observe the outcomes. And hands-on activities allow visitors to record newscasts and weather reports in front of studio-quality blue screens, then watch themselves just like they were really on broadcast TV.

As with many “interactive” computer games, the problem with these activities is the narrow range of options they provide.(8) At the “Interview a journalist” kiosk, for example, at which figures such as Ben Bradlee and Linda Ellerbee answer questions about their work, you can’t just formulate any question you want; you have to choose from the limited menu of questions for which answers have been recorded. Likewise, the “Be a reporter” and “Be an editor” adventures provide only a limited set of possible forking paths. The non-computer activities are even more constrained. Playing the role of TV newscaster means simply sitting in front of the camera and reading from the tele-prompter. There’s no room for improvisation, let alone reporting. Even the “Be a sportscaster” activity, in which you can announce historic sports events, discourages off-the-cuff improvisation by providing a play-by-play script.

These constraints on the role-player’s freedom to act strike an odd note after the mythologizing of “What’s News?” The heroic journalist, of course, is supposed to be “objective,” yet at the same time individualistic, showing personal initiative and courage in the pursuit of the story. But in a funny way, the limited choices available to mock-journalists in the interactive activities are ironically appropriate. The technical limits to your range of action in “Be a reporter” parallel the institutional framework which constrains actual reporters’ autonomy. And requiring mock-newscasters to read from a teleprompter is much more realistic than the more typical pretense that anchors actually write their own lines.

The weirdest part, then, is that most visitors don’t seem to mind being turned into talking heads. The interactive section is the most popular part of the Newseum. Friends flock to watch each others’ performances. The floor has the giddy feel of a karaoke bar; even strangers laugh and comment on each reporter’s delivery. After the somber moralism of “What’s News,” the crushing teleology of the news gallery, and the daunting technology of the video news wall, the more limited pretense of the interactive newsroom is oddly reassuring, cutting the grand claims of the Newseum down to size. Journalists aren’t always freedom fighters, or voices of the future. Sometimes, they’re just entertainers.

Footnotes

1. For another perspective on “Why We Hate the Media,” see Fallows, 1996. Surprisingly, in the annual Gallup survey (McAneny & Saad, 1997) in which respondents rate 26 professions for “honesty and ethical standards,” journalists, TV reporters and commentators, and newspaper reporters (the three groups are treated as separate occupations) all come out in the middle, below pharmacists and clergy but (slightly) above politicians and lawyers, and comfortably ahead of used-car salesmen. This to some extent demonstrates the more general erosion of American faith in professions and institutions. The numbers do show a significant drop-off from 1976, when Gallup began the survey. In 1976, 33 percent of Americans judged journalists to be of very high or high integrity; by 1997, the number was down to 23 percent.

2. I should point out that I am lumping together here the notion of objectivity with what Schudson, following James Carey (1988), calls the “transmission” model of communication. Although Schudson does not explicitly make the point, I am arguing here that the assumptions of the transmission model are critical to the ideology of objectivity, and that, conversely, the rival “ritual” model, which looks at the role of communication as “the symbolic production of reality” (Carey, 1988), is an implicit critique of the ideal of journalistic objectivity. In my view, Schudson understates the ideological function of objectivity. Objectivity is not simply a method for systematically processing information, but a strategy for effacing the social functions of news and mystifying the role of capital. (For examples of this more Marxist critique of objectivity, see Gans, 1979; Hartley, 1982.) I should also acknowledge that Schudson elsewhere (1978) distinguishes the 20th Century ideology of objectivity from 19th Century “naive realism.” The ideal of objectivity, Schudson argues, was formulated as a self-conscious reaction to an increasing sense of relativism, not out of a naive faith in “the facts.” While Schudson is no doubt correct in ascribing this sophisticated epistemological position to the originators of the notion of objectivity, I would argue that in practice today the distinction between objectivity and “naive realism” is often blurry. If anything, the Newseum’s move from heroic objectivity to the news stream is a return to a kind of naive realism; it responds to our even more relativistic times not by promoting an even more rigorous system for weighing competing versions of reality, but by imagining that a technological fix will make objectivity unnecessary by facilitating the unmediated flow of information.

3. USA Today, of course, has been heavily criticized since its debut in 1982. Its light coverage of international affairs, emphasis on celebrities, and preference for bite-sided “factoids” over lengthier analysis has been criticized as “fast-food journalism,” and earned it the sobriquet “McPaper” (see Prichard, 1987). In recent years, however, its journalistic reputation has improved, though perhaps only in comparison to the declining fortunes of newspapers elsewhere. As journalist David Remnick puts it,

USA Today no longer seems as shocking or ridiculous [as it did ten years ago]. It is true, the paper has gotten a little better, a little more attentive to the news, but what makes it seem almost stately is that so many big-city papers have declined so quickly. Papers form Miami to San Francisco have willfully eroded in a mad scramble to please the stockholder; in their attempts to be more “user friendly,” they betrayed themselves and the readers. There are precious few cities now where USA Today is not the best paper in town. God help us (Remnick, 1997).

1. In February of 1998, News Corp “dropped plans to publish a book by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, because of complaints from the company’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, that it took too negative a view of China. Murdoch … has extensive holdings in China and ambitious plans to expand them.” (Hodge, 1998a). The incident appears to be part of a larger pattern. In 1994, “to avoid irritating the Chinese Government, [Murdoch] removed the BBC news service from his Hong Kong-based satellite system, Star TV, after Beijing protested its documentaries on China and its coverage of Chinese dissidents” (Hodge, 1998a). And the former East Asia editor of Murdoch’s Times of London, Jonathan Minsky, stated in a speech in January of 1998, “The Times has simply decided, because of Murdoch’s interests, not to cover China in a serious way” (Hodge, 1998b). 5. Out of the many pieces on the opening of the Newseum I surveyed, only a review in the online magazine Salon (Featherstone, 1998) mentioned the protest.

2. Reese’s analysis of the Newseum in many ways parallels my own. But while Reese emphasizes the seamlessness of the way the Newseum “frames . . the news as an unproblematic commodity,” I’m more interested in the gaps and tensions which, I believe, point to the underlying contradictions - and utopian possibilities - implicit in the Newseum’s vision of journalism.

3. A perfect example of this nationalistic globalism can be seen in the structure of the News Gallery, as well. The early historical exhibits are impressively international (though essentializing), surveying information gathering techniques from around the globe. Once the Gutenberg Bible appears, however, the focus narrows to Europe and North America. And when the narrative hits 1776, the rest of the world’s press disappears. The international media doesn’t resurface until the exhibits reach the 1980s, in a section triumphally titled “The Global Village is here.” Once the American media has reached the rest of the world, the rest of the world starts to matter again.

4. For a more extended critique of the “forking-paths” model of interactivity, see my essay, “Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality” (1995).

Works Cited

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