WASHINGTON — When the Newseum opened here on prime Pennsylvania Avenue real estate in 2008, Stephen Colbert joked that they got the name wrong. They should have called it the Newsoleum, he claimed: “The joke’s on you, journalists.” People and things don’t end up in museums, he said, until “there’s no use for them anymore.”
As a journalist, I’d naturally wanted to visit the Newseum since first hearing of it. It’s packed with tributes to the First Amendment and the vital history of the nation’s print and electronic media. For over a decade the six-floor building has housed several tons of the Berlin Wall, galleries of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs and editorial cartoons, and at least one bathroom adorned with glass tiles engraved with the kind of inadvertently comical headlines that editors wish they’d flushed. “High Schoolers Ignorant of Finances, Quiz Shows,” reads one from the Denver Post. (We’ll wait while you read that last bit twice.)
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I’d get to the Newseum eventually, I figured. Then, a couple of months ago, the institution abruptly announced that it would be closing by the end of the year. Stop the presses! Time to pack my reporter’s notebook and book a flight.
“Are you coming to say goodbye to us?” asked the smiling woman at the coat check when I arrived. The building has been sold to Johns Hopkins University; some artifacts will head out on traveling exhibitions or go on display at the area’s two airports. The digital version of Today’s Front Pages, the crowd-pleasing collection that has greeted visitors on the sidewalk outside, will remain online, and the administration and board of trustees are exploring options for potential future sites for the museum.
But the closing of the current location — just across from the National Gallery of Art, with a spectacular view of the nearby US Capitol from the sixth-floor terrace — will be a big loss for Washington tourism. Just as publishers have learned the difficulty of selling newsprint in the age of the Internet, the nonprofit Newseum has been unable to lure enough paying customers to sustain itself amid so many world-class Smithsonian museums along the National Mall, which are free of charge.
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Reliving the news can require a robust constitution. One of the first displays at the Newseum is a massive tangle of twisted metal recovered from the World Trade Center ruins, backdropped by a gallery of outraged front pages dated Sept. 12, 2001. On the third floor, the faces of hundreds of journalists who died or were killed while reporting the news are gathered in a haunting, elegant memorial. Bostonians might sense an eerie deja vu in a basement gallery dedicated to FBI investigations, where the Marathon bombing and the manhunt for Whitey Bulger both figure prominently.
But there are lighter sides, too. Late-night comedy is well-represented, including the set from “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and a screening room looping recent clips from fake newscasts and talk-show monologues. In a display covering the press’s role in the American Revolution, the apoplectic comedian Lewis Black jokes, “From what I gather, a number of our Founding Fathers had anger management issues.”
And in a short film on sports in American life, the late Bert Sugar recalls an era when sportswriters wouldn’t dare report unflattering news about superstar athletes, who boosted circulation numbers. He recounts a tale of Babe Ruth, “buck naked,” sprinting through a dining car on a train, chased by an equally undressed woman brandishing a knife.
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“Well,” as one reporter supposedly said to his poker mates, “there goes another story we won’t cover.”
The whole town is conversant in mediaspeak. At an eccentric dive bar near Dupont Circle called the Big Hunt, where Fox News flickered on the overhead TV, a young Oklahoman who recently completed his graduate studies at Harvard was eager to talk about his time in Boston. Wearing a suit and a dark blue tie with a pattern of little American flags, he eventually allowed that he works for Homeland Security. More than once, he prefaced his remarks with a favorite phrase: “Full disclosure,” he said.
Despite the wishes of some in power, the closing of the Newseum does not in fact signal the impending obsolescence of a free press. Metaphor-wise, there’s plenty more evidence of journalism’s role in American life and history on permanent display around the capital. National Public Radio, for instance, offers a daily tour, which I took with a group of concerned individuals from Wisconsin, North Carolina, Peru, and Australia. The organization moved into its pristine new building, in the once-desolate NoMa (“North of Massachusetts Ave.”) neighborhood, in 2013.
Visitors are treated to an inside look at the huge, multi-level NPR newsroom and one of the studios from which some familiar voices deliver the news to more than 1,000 member stations and an estimated 38 million weekly listeners. Amy, our volunteer tour guide, also gave us a glimpse of the NPR Music office, where the four members of a project called Mellotron Variations were setting up for a Tiny Desk concert. NPR headquarters has been awarded for its environmental design, Amy said, with a green roof, a comprehensive composting program, and two honeybee colonies perched outside the newsroom. They’re affectionately known — brace yourself — as Swarming Edition and All Stings Considered.
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Tours are also available of the Voice of America studios, adjacent to the Capitol Building, and many of the city’s archival institutions feature further proof of journalism’s ongoing role in a healthy democracy. (Only 13 percent of the world’s people live in countries with a free press, as we learned in an orientation video at the Newseum.) Over at the National Portrait Gallery, there’s a strong showing of notable journalists and historians, from the photographers Margaret Bourke-White and Ernie Pyle to the media moguls Adolph Ochs (New York Times) and Robert Johnson (BET).
Opened in 2016 as the newest museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of African American History & Culture honors several news gatherers throughout its majestic space, from the founders of the first African-American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, launched in 1827, to Robert Churchwell, the “Jackie Robinson of journalism,” who became the first black staff reporter at an all-white paper in the South when he joined the Nashville Banner in 1950. The work of many great photographers, of course, was critical to the spread of information about the black struggle in America; “Without the media, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings,” as Representative John Lewis is quoted in an exhibit at the Newseum.
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My brief two-day sortie through the nation’s capital, where the news has been under attack, concluded at Off the Record. It’s a plush, maroon-themed watering hole on the basement level of the historic Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Square from the north face of the White House.
A boisterous happy hour crowd squeezed in amid the Christmas decorations, watched over by the famous political caricatures on the walls and the drink coasters. Few seemed to pay any mind as the TV screen over the bartenders’ shoulders flashed CNN’s Jim Acosta citing an unnamed source about the president’s agitation over the impeachment hearings. The reporter was standing on his mark on the White House lawn, just a few hundred yards away.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.