Bearer of news: Satellites that changed the way news is gathered and disseminated
The Newseum in D.C. is an ambitious and riveting monument to news, to events that hit the headlines, and to the people who risked their lives documenting them
A giant section of the Berlin wall.
Satellites that changed the way news is gathered and disseminated. The radio,
which heralded live coverage in the 1930s. Pulitzer-winning images that touched
our collective consciousness. A chronicle of U.S.’s ‘First Dogs’ that inhabited
the White House. And news broadcasts that keep visitors updated on what is
happening now even as they explore what happened then. The Newseum, a
Washington D.C.-based museum dedicated to journalism, celebrates news and the
people who make the news — and particularly the brave men and women who
sacrificed their lives at its altar.
In a city that has a plethora of free
Smithsonian Museums, we find ourselves swamped here with ‘where-were-you-when’
moments as we browse its halls, where history is not confined to books but
relayed live by the world media as it unfolds.
At the seven-level steel-and-glass building
with 250,000 sq.ft. of floor space, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement,
the alternative press and Woodstock come alive. Memories, they say, get
submerged with the flood of time but they surged to the surface as we walk
through the galleries — 15 of them to be precise. Suddenly, the song If you
are going to San Francisco (the 60s song that was the rallying cry of the
hippy counter-culture and anti-war movement in the U.S.) started to buzz in my
head. I find myself fighting back a tear as I chance upon a photograph in the
Pulitzer Prize Photograph Gallery: a black-and-white image of a little boy
asking a guard why he had to get back behind the security cordon of a military
parade. There are many other images that beckon and emotions that threaten to
surface.
The adage ‘stale news is no news’ does not
hold good here. And today’s Front Pages Gallery displays the front pages of
newspapers from around the world — including a few from India and its regional
press. Over 700 newspapers submit digital images of their front pages each day
and of these around 80 are displayed. Indeed, not even a toilet break can get
you away from news: the tiles around men’s urinals have little snippets of news
gone wrong and clarifications issued by editors. One tile said it all: ‘To err
is human, to correct divine.’ And not all news is earth-shattering. What, for
instance, is a red dress doing in a glass case? It was worn by a White House
reporter who seemed to be the favourite of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. When
asked to explain why he seemed to single her out to shoot questions at him, he
is reported to have said: “Wear a red dress and you are more likely to be
noticed.”
The Time Line, an interactive archive of old
newspapers and magazines, some dating back to 1455, would have taken a day, a
week, maybe even a month to explore. One parchment in a temperature and
humidity-controlled glass case catches my eye: it illustrates a public
execution by beheading in a town square.
One panel has a row of lopped off heads with
captions identifying who they belonged to. Back to the more recent past, the
front page of newspapers that appeared on the day after 9/11 brought back the
shock of the event. And of the many tragic stories linked to the collapse of
the Twin Towers is one of a photojournalist. While most people ran away from
the collapsing skyscrapers, Bill Biggart ran towards them with his cameras only
to perish in the debris. The two mangled cameras he used to record the events
of the day and the images recovered from them are displayed in a glass case.
Biggart’s story is in many ways the central
theme that runs through the Newseum: of the perils journalists face. In one
corner of the museum is the mangled car in which investigative reporter Don
Bolles was killed by a bomb placed under it.
In another corner is a bullet-ridden van from
the violent streets of Baghdad. We punched in ‘India’ on a keyboard at the
Journalist Memorial Gallery and the names and images of journalists who lost
their lives in the line of their work popped up. There were many. If only we
had the time we would have loved to check in at the Interactive Newsroom where
visitors get to play the role of editors, reporters and anchors. But the real world
outside the museum beckons; a world in which events were unravelling and there
was no knowing which one would hit the headlines.
Gustasp Irani is a travel writer and
photographer.
Source | The Hindu | 4 September 2016
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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