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No museum as newsy as the Newseum

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history," says Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post

Esther Samboh (The Jakarta Post)
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Sun, February 28, 2010

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No museum as newsy as the Newseum

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history," says Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. But even that "rough draft of history" has had its share of downfalls, trials and excitement.

The Newseum in Washington D.C. brings together all the emotions of journalism with various stories. Consider just a few: A hardened reporter weeps when covering the 9/11 attack; a music journalist refuses his editor's order to report Woodstock as "a catastrophe in the making"; a female sports journalist enters the New York Yankees' change room for the first; and a journalist changes Americans' perspectives on Vietnam War with his editorial.

At the Newseum, you can also see how the work of a female journalist marked the start of investigative journalism, as she pretended to be insane in order to expose the horrendous treatment of women in an American insane asylum. Fast forward to World War II, when journalism legend Edward R. Murrow delivered a live radio report from a London rooftop - you can watch that as well, thanks to the Newseum's 4D theater.

For a city as small as Washington, DC, which is about the size of South Jakarta, to have 30 museums is a test of your wisdom if you have only a short time, as you are forced to choose the ones most likely to interest you.

But if you're a news, journalism or history junkie, Newseum is undoubtedly your dope. The world's first and only interactive museum, Newseum is like no other. It can touch your heart as well as broaden (and test?) your knowledge of news, journalism and world history.

Let me take you on a tour .

On the nation's main street, Pennsylvania Avenue, which connects US Capitol and the White House, stands firm a seven-story, glassy, monolithic building, with a 74-foot-high marble engraving of the First Amendment attached to it.

For US$20 (for a two-day pass), visitors can visit the 14 main exhibition galleries and 15 theaters exploring events and aspects of journalism (ethics, the master control room, etc.), news history from the beginning of documentaries and sports news, to the complete collection of Pulitzer photojournalism winners, as well as an insight into how the media have covered major historical events, such as Woodstock, the Cold War era and 9/11.

The Newseum also features interactive kiosks, with up-to-the-second technology, showcasing the latest front pages of newspapers around the globe - including Indonesia, with Media Indonesia as the representative.

However, Media Indonesia is not the only newspaper representing Indonesia at the Newseum. Another Indonesia-based newspaper is also displayed there, attached to the 9/11 gallery's wall on the fifth floor, along with hundreds of other newspapers from around the world. The name of the newspaper? Yes, it's The Jakarta Post, with its front page headlining: "Planes strike U.S. icons of power".

Inside the 9/11 theater, visitors were in tears as they watched a video of reporters giving their eyewitness accounts of covering the 9/11 attack. They mostly described problems of finding a balance within themselves between being a reporter and a regular person, as the grief was so unbelievably strong.

A sequence of the video shows an interview with one of the attack's eyewitnesses. She broke down and when she couldn't resume, the reporter hugged her, saying, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry," crying all the while.

The reporter was with a DC local television channel, ABC Channel 7. In the video, he says, "I never cried on an assignment before. But I did then."

The gloominess of the 9/11 gallery and theater is inevitable, which is probably why they put the Woodstock gallery and theater right next to it, to help cheer visitors up.

The Woodstock exhibition gallery takes visitors back to the 60s, when half a million people flocked to the legendary music festival.

The video played in the Woodstock theater shows a New York Times reporter, Barnard Collier, saying how his editor had told him to write in particular that Woodstock is a "catastrophe in the making".

But he didn't write it, because his view of Woodstock was a complete 180 to his editor's. "It's not a catastrophe in the making. It's history in the making," he says.

Another history-making event portrayed in the Newseum is the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On first entering the museum, I came across the "disturbing" view of a huge concrete wall, on the lower level, with colorful, artsy graffiti. When I went downstairs, I learned it was a 12-foot-high piece of the original Berlin Wall.

The same level hold other interesting exhibits to see, such as the sports gallery and theater, which tells of the rise of sports journalism rose, showing how the achievements of female athletes had been under-reported because all sports reporters were men.

But then Mary Garber, a Sports Illustrated reporter, managed to be the first female journalist to enter the New York Yankees change room. Can you imagine, the only woman in an all-men's room where everybody is running around bare? That event changed the perspective of sports journalism into how it is today.

The Documentary Theater showed how a newsman could stop a war. This was during the era of the Vietnam War, when American journalism legend Walter Cronkite broadcast his documentary on the Vietnam War, ending the piece with a bold and brave statement: "But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."

With his editorial, the reporter, widely known as "the most trusted man in America", changed the Americans' point of view overnight. And Cronkite, who believed that only under extreme conditions should a journalist share an opinion in a report (in which case it should be clearly labeled as such), thus affected the political fate of America .

But the Newseum is not all politics and history. There are also fun things to do there. On the second floor is an Interactive Newsroom section featuring "games" about journalism ethics, news-gathering techniques, and "Be a TV Reporter" kiosks.

In the single-standing interactive kiosks, visitors face several questions that journalists and editors have to tackle in their everyday work, such as: "Should you alter a photograph to get a more dramatic image?" and "Is it appropriate to use an anonymous source to report a story?"

Visitors can also be an actual TV newscaster for 5 minutes, with a real camera and prompter, and get a CD copy of their "stand-up".

If you build up an appetite, there's a fine dining restaurant in the museum complex, behind the Newseum building. The Source by Wolfgang Puck is the District's first fine-dining restaurant headlined by the well-known Austrian chef, Wolfgang Puck.

It also has an urban living apartment backyard, called the Newseum Residences, where the rent on two-bedroom apartments starts at US$3,500 a month; studios go for half that price.

A luxurious apartment complex and a fine dining restaurant connected to a place where profiles and stories of humble hacks are assembled? That can only happen at the Newseum. Welcome to the modern freedom of speech era!

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