Return to the Adder's Lair
I know most of you will probably never have the chance to visit beautiful Rosslyn, VA, where we are presently living. But on the off chance that this happens, I want to put out a museum advisory:
DO NOT GO TO THE NEWSEUM. IT IS THE LAMEST THING ON EARTH.
The "Newseum," the "museum of news" where "fun is a matter of fact," is a nonprofit thing sponsored by the Freedom Forum, a organization of journalists which must have some pretty heavy-hitting contributors judging by the amount of media technology mobilized to create this thing. I went there a few weeks back and was so appalled that on Saturday I dragged my partner in just to see the 15-minute video presentation entitled "What is News?"
The first time I went was a weekday, so I was unaware that the weekend presentation would begin wtih an actor running on in a leather apron and green eyeshade and doing a very energetic but very poorly received educational monologue about the difference that the telegraph made to the American media of the 1840s. It was clearly designed to be interactive, but the crowd was not working with him. About one minute into it my partner said, "That poor man." And it was true that my heart was filled with pity as I watched him do his best to escape from the performance having suffered something less than total humiliation, but I still couldn't help laughing. When he finally ran gratefully away, she added, "You know those Army commercials where the guy says, 'This is for my father, who worked triple shifts so we could have better lives?' They should do one with his kid saying, 'This is for my father, who acted in really embarrassing skits at museums to put food on our table.'"
Then the video started. Now, I don't know how to convey this in words, but essentially this thing is a 15-minute music video whose only purpose appears to be to not only glorify but actually perform everything that is dangerous and bad about contemporary American media journalism. Billed as the "inside story on how news is made," the thing tells you nothing about how news is made. "What is news?" it asks. "War is news," it says. But, "peace is also news." "Life is news....and death is news." "Love is news...and hate is also news." You can see where this is going.
While this uninspired narration is delivered in the same guy who does the voiceovers for all Republican campaign commercials, cotton ads, and Mormon PSAs, we are looking at images culled from various media. Now, keep in mind, none of these images are identified. They appear, and a couple seconds later are superimposed on by other images, so that the effect is of a constantly shifting collage and there's never fewer than about six different focus points on the screen. Now, this is all very visually interesting, but it means that a) unless you've already seen them, you don't know what these are images of and b) they are almost completely stripped of meaning or context, which helps them create the clearly desired effect c), the "news" is presented as a completely apolitical, universal organic thing which arises apparently spontaneously out of the hearts of the fine men and women of this country and is completely uninfluenced by any petty considerations like ideology, corporate ownership/censorship of media outlets, ratings-consciousness, etc. etc. etc.
For instance, Big Reassuring White Man Voice says, "No matter where it happens, war is always news." Uh huh. If Americans are involved, or might soon be involved, or if the massacre reaches Bosnian or Rwandan proportions. The fact that this segment ends with a montage of Gulf War coverage does not help me not loathe it. As far as I'm concerned, to show us footage of Operation Reelect Bush without then following it with images of America's media journalists beating their chests, dumping ash on their heads and chanting "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa," is already as big a piece of hypocrisy as you can really expect even from the media. If there was ever a time when American TV journalism covered itself in shame while slithering obsequiously on its belly toward the military like the boot-licking lackey it is, that time was during Operation Desert Storm. Of course, nothing in the Newseum will tell you anything about how the American military controlled the media's access to the region or how tamely the media allowed it to do so, or suggest that this might explain the lack of extant footage documenting the destruction we were wreaking on man, woman and child in Iraq and the correlating glut of images of happy Kuwaitis kissing American flags, Patriot missiles accomplishing apparently bloodless "surgical strikes," and Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf crowing about our military triumphs. But hey. That'd be a downer, and here at the Newseum, "fun is a matter of fact."
Similarly, "Love is news, wherever it happens." Sure, as long as it happens between heterosexual persons. I watched. Identifiably gay people appeared twice in this video, and both times it was in the context of AIDS, which is assimilated both visually and through the narration with other natural-disaster type diseases as if there were no distinctive social elements of this epidemic. Firsts are also news, "whether it's the first day at a new school, or being first on the field." Well, the image that goes with the first half of that sentence is of the first court-ordered integration of a public high school, and the second one is of Jackie Robinson. OK, I knew the child in that picture was walking into a minefield at the center of the biggest ongoing war this country has ever waged, but if you didn't recognize the picture you'd think "oh how cute, a little kid going off to her first day of school."
In short: we'll tell you what's news, but we'll be damned if were gonna tell you why, how, or what it means. Because that would really be kinda embarrassing to us, the brave people who risk our lives to bring you 1 and a half minute spots that boil down incredibly complicated situations into the most melodramatic images we can find accompanied by simplistic and cliched dialogue.
Anyway, the whole museum is like the video--slick, polished, a mile wide and a millimeter deep, unreflective and almost entirely uncritical. Essentially, this is a giant commercial for network news, and may be almost as ethically and educationally bankrupt as the Duke Tobacco "Museum."
The one bright spot in this visit is that on the way out, there are computer terminals where you can pull up a "newspaper" that summarizes the major world events on the day you were born. My partner punched hers in and found out that "Midnight Cowboy" won Best Picture, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were president, and many other interesting fun facts. So I punched in my birthdate--April 16, 1969. Banner headline across the top: "Britain sends troops to Ireland."
We both just started laughing fit to bust our guts. On April 16, 1969, the British Army is moving into Belfast and Derry in the first stage of what is going to become a 28-years-and-counting Army presence in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, in a hospital in Michigan, my mother is giving birth to an eeny weeny little Irish Studies scholar. Is it possible that there really is something in this astrology thing? That I felt the cosmic connection and that my first eeny weeny thought upon looking up at my mother's face was, "From across the Atlantic I hear the cry of terrible suffering. Someday, somehow, I must endeavor to right this wrong"?
Anyway, the verdict on the Newseum is "avoid, avoid, avoid." You'll learn more about how the news gets made from my occasional updates on the world of news production via my sister. Case in point: her next spot on Discovery News is on a bunch of people who will be rather ill-advisedly recreating Leif Ericson's voyage from Greenland to Canada. (The fact that only 2 of the men on the crew are experienced sailors and they're not having a chase boat does not appear to bother them.) Anyhow, Lynn says that these guys were told by a producer for one of the Big Three networks, "Look, this is all very interesting, but bottom line: unless somebody dies, we're not going to run this story."
Death is news,
The Plaid Adder
Return to the Adder's Lair