ARLINGTON, Va. -- They have been bell-ringers and drum-beaters, smoke-signal senders and tablet scratchers. Storytellers all, conduits of the daily poop, held in low regard even in ancient days. As Sophocles said in 441 B.C.: "Nobody likes the bringer of bad news."
Not then, not now. Especially not now, what with their like having been so fruitful, so multiple and so noisy. Nowhere to run these days to escape the constant drumbeat: news, news, news, news.
Perhaps it was just a matter of time, then, before someone built a monument to the often vexing national conversation we call The News. It's called the Newseum, a $50 million explainer of the history and practice of journalism, featuring a 220-seat theater, interactive computers, a television studio, a display of 70 newspaper front pages updated daily and a monstrous wall of television screens that should satisfy even the most hopeless news junkie.
Located across the Potomac River from Washington in Rosslyn, the Newseum took five years to plan and build. Newseum executive director Peter S. Prichard says the hope is that the place will foster understanding between the public and the media, an often uneasy relationship.
Americans like their news and want lots of it, the surveys show. Unfortunately, they tend to view the people who deliver it with mistrust if not disdain. Put it this way: News reporters are right up there in public esteem with elected officials, lawyers and corporate executives.
Sophocles' observation suggests this attitude is a historic constant. But Prichard says an overheated news market has made matters worse, especially in electronic media.
"I do think the rise of so many news sources, the rise of what I call hypercompetition has contributed to the rise of mistrust," says Prichard, former editor-in-chief of USA Today. "There's been a lot of unfairness, and people see it and they don't like it."
The Newseum is the work of the Freedom Forum, an independent offspring of the Gannett Foundation, now worth $800 million, which is devoted to "free press, free speech and free spirit." Admission to the Newseum, which opens tomorrow, is also free, the better to encourage visitors and dissemination of the good news contained in the First Amendment.
