Freedom of the Press Moguls

[Joanne98]

By Chris Lehmann
Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine The Newseum, the latest addition to Washington’s sprawling, preening, self-singing monument-memorial complex, may boast a constitutional amendment engraved on its $450 million façade, and an outsized collection of press arcana, but it beckons to the visitor in the same fashion that the nightly news does to the suburban homeowner: You go downstairs and watch TV. Or rather, you begin your tour at the Hearst Corporation-sponsored Orientation Theater at the concourse level, opposite the Wolfgang Puck-catered food court.

However — since I follow directions poorly — I sit down in the wrong theater. It is showing a glowing retrospective on sports journalism, and it takes me some time to realize my error. The hero hymned on screen is Roone Arledge — the famous former director of ABC’s sports coverage, who seamlessly transitioned into the network’s news director. Perhaps, I think, we are watching the corporate-newsmasters-of-indeterminate-portfolio segment of the documentary “What Is News?”

However, after a verbally mangled paean to Arledge’s titanic genius — former ABC sportscaster Jim McKay says that “the words, ‘the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat’ ” (the slogan Arledge dreamt up for “ABC’s Wide World of Sports”) had “become, literally, part of our language” — we segue into a segment on how the Olympics makes news, and I sense a pattern emerging.

So I’m off to the real Orientation Theater, sure that it will divulge the real nature of news.

I am soon oriented toward the core belief that news is made up of mind-numbingly banal binary oppositions: Birth/Death; War/Peace; Hate/Love. On-screen commentators offer up similar anodyne formulas, as does our voice-over narrator, “CBS Morning News” anchor Charles Osgood. He strings together sonorous syllogisms that signify very nearly nothing, e.g. “Facts come first, then ideas, then ideals,” and “Information is where liberty starts.”

Such billowing wordplay isn’t coming across, literally, as part of our language. Still, as the lights come up, it sets off one nearby patron.

“I like how they have all this leftist propaganda,” sneers a guy in knee-length checkered shorts and a West Virginia baseball cap.

At the computer kiosk outside Orientation Theater it dawns on me that my pedestrian quest for literal meaning is missing the Newseum’s main point: It is not a memorial to news, or newsgathering, but, rather, a lavish, atrium-enhanced, multiscreen advertisement that extols slogans, personalities and — most of all — the concept of press ownership. For here at the touchscreen kiosk, visitors can imbibe every Hearst-branded celebration … of the Hearst brand. In a filmed statement, the company CEO praises his corporation’s excellent taste in partnering with the Newseum. A different button yields a tour through Hearst Corp.’s many media properties. Yet another gives a history of the company’s excellent track record of media consolidation.

Since I’m a former Hearst employee, I’m eager to see how the mother company — which in 2000 offloaded its flagship property, the San Francisco Examiner, six years after a bitter strike paralyzed it for months — is gilding its past for the Newseum crowd.

We learn that the company launched itself into the modern news era when media mogul William Randolph Hearst took control of the Examiner from his dad in 1887. We catch a discreet reference to the elder Hearst being elected to the U.S. Senate, but there’s little mention of William’s colorful political interests: his role plumping for the imperialist Spanish-American War, or his lengthy, vicious career as strike-breaker and Red-baiter.

Instead, we get a drumbeat recitation of the properties Hearst acquired, and the technological domains he conquered: “By the 1920s, Hearst had 28 newspapers nationwide.”

His papers were the first to feature color comics!

He bought up magazines by the bushelful!

Radio stations, too!

So it is throughout the Newseum’s 250,000 square feet of exhibition space. We see a distinct premium placed on the news industry’s largeness, and precious little recognition of its purpose.

Oh, there is, of course, plenty of First Amendment talk, and fond looks back at when journalists clashed with notions of executive branch prior restraint. But for all the heroic talk of the press’ role in preserving liberty and democracy, there’s no reckoning with the overtly political ends that a commercial press pursues.

Even less is there any examination of why we have a commercial press in the first place, or how frenetic consolidation of media properties disfigures the public’s stake in journalism.

When you take the elevator up to the fifth floor and work your way down the vast exhibition areas, for instance, you first encounter an exhibition on News History (mislabeled, in a Huxley-esque typo on a sign next to the elevator, “New History”). There, the kiosk-vertisement is for NewsCorp, which had the vision to grace the unsuspecting world with Fox News.

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3755/freedom_of_the_press_moguls/

[fasttense]

1. Interesting read.

But why are they trying to Free Newt? Has someone finally jailed the idiot? It is a banner ad at the top of the story.