"From Heroic Objectivity to the News Stream: The Newseum's Strategies for Relegitimizing Journalism in the Information Age"
Ted Friedman
Originally published in 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.
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