We’re On Deadline

The profession's low points get scant attention. Three museum attendants had to be asked before a reporter, on a recent visit, could find out whether the museum included any references to famous journalism scandals. "It's not really an exhibit," a manager finally said, pointing downstairs to what turned out to be a video screen near the basement-level bathrooms. The short film makes note of frauds such as Jayson Blair of the New York Times and collective screw-ups, like the false report that 12 trapped West Virginia miners were found alive in 2006. (The narrator, an avuncular newsman named Gordon Petersen, lays the blame for most journalistic failings on a few bad apples and deadline pressure.) Only a collection of New Yorker cartoons lampooning the media lands some genuine punches, hitting the industry for hype, fake trend-spotting, thin data and self-congratulation. But the cartoons are displayed in a space dominated by a 40-by-22-foot high-def video screen flashing historic battle photos and front-page headlines overlaid by the message "News is … War."

Promoting the glory while burying the bad is perhaps inevitable in a museum that's funded in significant part by the very institutions it features. Which is, of course, not unusual. America's Peanut Farmers pay for ads that offer a "friendly reminder" that peanuts are a protein-packed snack, while America's Cotton Producers have for years touted cotton as the "Fabric of Our Lives." Perception management companies such Burson-Marsteller and Edelman have built similar campaigns to polish the public images of downtrodden industries, like oil and gas. It's just that the PR tone clashes with journalism's ethos of objectivity and skepticism. The Newseum says its mission is to "promote a better understanding of news and journalism." "If the museum helps convince people that journalists produce something of value," says Dalton Conley, a New York University sociologist who studies social status, it could increase the levels of trust and appreciation the industry enjoys. "But there's also an ironic tension at play: by advertising itself, journalism could come across as less professional for pandering to clients, rather than performing for peers."

The 15,000 or so journalists whose jobs have blinked out of existence in the last decade may rightfully complain that their profession channeled a fortune into a museum rather than, say, an endowed newspaper. But if the museum's message sinks in, it may have held off the day when journalism has to write its own obituary.

© 2008