Friday, January 30, 2009
I Got The News
We've been in Washington, DC the past two days. The is our first trip as tourists. Previous visits (many) have been business. Today we wandered to the US Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the Holocaust Museum. While on our way to lunch, we passed the relatively new Newseum, a modern museum on the history of the news media. We plan to go tomorrow. But there was a very noticeable feature on the outside that motivates today's post. In the exterior windows is a display of about 100 daily newspaper front pages from dailies around the country. I looked all along the Pennyslvania Avenue frontage where they are displayed. The Newseum confirms our own local opinion of reportage in Oregon. There was not a single Oregon newspaper represented. A couple from South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, and New Mexico made it to the big time along with Pravda, a German paper, and virtually every big city daily. But nothing from Oregon. But those of us who live in Oregon already know that. We don't have any useful newspapers. That's why most of us enjoy our news elsewhere. Our daily Pulitzer-winning birdcage liner is apparently not important enough to make it to the Newseum. That that's news.
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5 comments:
Hmmm...the Statesman-Journal, Register Guard, and Oregonian front pages for today are all shown PDF format in the Newseum's online front page section.
They may be available in the online edition but trust me, they are on display nowhere in the front windows of the real (physical) place. There are more than 100 newspaper front pages in the front window. Not one from Oregon, but every other dinky state. I didn't notice Washington (state) either. Again, their newspapers are equally bad.
I assume the papers posted at the Newseum are actual paper copies. With the Boregonian no longer sending the dead tree edition farther south than Salem, I'd be surprised to see it or many other papers from the west part of the country.
You could be right, but they had papers from little burgs in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana, to name a few. The Oregonian still mails papers to subscribers around the country, including libraries, so there must be another reason why they aren't included.
Just as an FYI. We went *inside* the Newseum today. It is a wonderful place that has 6 floors of exhibits. It only opened early in 2008 and so everything is clean and new. To be fair, upstairs in the Newseum, other newspapers from around the company are on display. We did find the Oregonian, Seattle P-I, and the Eugene Register Guard on display up there. But in the outside window, there were no identifiable Oregon papers on display.
If you come to Washington, please do set aside about 3 or 4 hours to visit this national treasure. You won't find anything like it elsewhere. There are originals of virtually every famous newspaper front page - e.g. Dewey Defeats Truman -, every Pulitzer Prize winning photo, including some of the most famous photos of all time (Iwo Jima comes to mind). There are also pieces of the Berlin Wall, the radio tower on top of the North World Trade Center Building, original copies of the "Bill of Rights".
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