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Newseum Opens Friday, April 11, 2008 Washington, D.C.
When the reconsituted, new and improved Newseum opens tomorrow, April 11, 2008 in Washington, D.C. visitors will be given a chance to celebrate 500 years of news history. Yippee!
The highly touted media museum, which is more than a decade old, shut its doors at its former location in Rosslyn, Vrginia, in 2002 to plan for this new, upgraded ediface. The price tag for this facility: a whopping $450 million to construct.
 Jon Friedman, of MarketWatch, recently was pondering the strange appeal of the Newseum. In his commentary he say the ” new facility just seems self-indulgent.”
Friedman further states, “In creating the Newseum’s exhibits, curators may have overlooked some of the most memorable — and shameful — moments in the media.”
Friedman offers a look at the top ten items that should have been included in the exhibits in the fantasty titled “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” wing of the Newseum. We publish Friedman’s list below:
please hold your applause until the end.
The Top 10 featured exhibits:
1. I Gave CBS the Best Four Decades of My Life and All I Got Was This Lousy Pink Slip: This displays a statue of Dan Rather, who was the most convenient villain (or was it scapegoat?) for CBS’ CBS disastrous “60 Minutes” segment on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. CBS and Rather both apologized, but Rather took the fall, inelegantly and loudly.
2) Give War a Chance: This features none other than Judith Miller, the former New York Times NYT reporter whose poorly sourced stories helped elicit support for the U.S.’ ill-advised invasion of Iraq.
3) No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Roughly a decade ago, the New York Times decided to make Jayson Blair a star. Little did the Times realize he’d turn on them so viciously and write a string of fabricated stories, leading to the professional demise of the paper’s two top editors.
4. Who Says a Newspaper Reporter Can’t Make a Decent Buck? R. Foster Winans, who wrote the Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column a quarter-century ago, showed it can be done! All it takes, apparently, is an insider’s knowledge of the stock market, some decent connections on Wall Street and absolutely no scruples! Winans served time in prison in connection with giving a stockbroker an early heads-up on his column’s subject material. (The Journal, like MarketWatch, is now a unit of News Corp. NWS.)
5. Cinderella: This tells the saga of how a young reporter (Janet Cooke) and a great American daily newspaper (the Washington Post WPO) realized the ambition of winning a Pulitzer for an astonishing story about an 8-year-old heroin dealer working the streets of Washington. True, she owned the award for only a few days: When Cooke admitted she had made it all up, editors were reminded that when a story seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. It’s a lesson the media have never quite grasped, unfortunately.
6. Money for Nothing: This is a display of Time Inc.’s TWX canceled check, (reportedly for $6 million, according to industry speculation), made out to Jennifer Lopez for the right to publish photos of her newborn twins in People magazine. I hope the journalists who have been laid off from the company over the past few years get free copies of the magazine.
7. Who Says Journalists Have No Sense of Humor? Not Time Out Chicago! It recently played an April Fool’s joke on the world when it said that Donald Trump had purchased the magazine. It was, of course, a hoax — and a stupid one. It was damaging, too, because Crain’s Chicago took the bait and ran with the made-up story.
8. Name That President! This is the height of participatory journalism because, gosh darn it, everyone gets to act like a television news anchor and deliver an actual broadcast. Guess who won the 2000 presidential election? On election night, your guess was as good as the television networks’, which bungled the assignment. In 1972, Timothy Crouse wrote a brilliant, biting book called “The Boys on the Bus” to mark the 1972 presidential campaign. Twenty-eight years later, he could’ve called a new volume “Throw the Boys Under the Bus!”
9. Who’s That Girl? What’s a museum without a whiff of intrigue? The New York Times recently published a story that said, in so many words, that campaign advisers of Sen. John McCain had tried hard to keep a lobbyist away from him during the 2000 campaign. But really, the story all but suggested that McCain may have had an inappropriate relationship with her. The Times never apologized for the lame story, but it still should.
10. Take the Money and Run: Let’s not forget the bean counters. In 1999, the Los Angeles Times looked greedy and stupid when it published a big Sunday magazine section dealing with the Staples Center, the home of basketball and hockey teams in downtown Los Angeles. It eventually spilled out that the newspaper was dividing the advertising profits with the arena. Whoops.
See the next post for questions we’d like to see posed by members of the Fourth Estate, the media for Governor Paterson of New York.
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