PREVIEW: Newseum honours journalism heroes, buzzes with action

Apr 8, 2008, 13:02 GMT

Washington - When his plane crashed in December 1994, Hitoshi Numasawa, the Nairobi correspondent for Kyodo news service, was on his way to cover one of the first foreign deployments of Japanese soldiers since the end of World War II.

The troops were headed to a humanitarian mission in the refugee camps in Goma, in the former Zaire, where tens of thousands of Hutu killers and their families fled after the Rwanda genocide.

On board the plane out of Nairobi's Wilson Airport with Hitoshi were Toshihiko Irie, Cairo bureau chief for Fuji Television, and Fuji's Egyptian cameraman, Nader Habib.

Their names are now on a 12-metre-high wall of glass panels that lists the 1,843 known journalists who have died on assignment around the world.

The wall was dedicated last week as part of Washington's newest museum, the Newseum, which is to open Friday.

Really, it's a reopening.

The Newseum first opened in 1997 in a Washington suburb, only to close the original site in 2002 in preparation for a relocation to the capital's most prestigious address - Pennsylvania Avenue, the 5- kilometre promenade from Capitol Hill to the White House.

The Newseum's new location near the US Capitol is a statement about the role of a free press in American democracy. But more than that, the Newseum and its vast, interactive exhibits encompass the global media - and its heroes.

Newseum chief executive Charles Overby last week called the Journalists' Memorial 'the heart of the museum.'

The memorial occupies a remote corner of the modern glass-and- steel structure, but buzzing within earshot are displays with video footage of Martin Luther King Jr's 'I have a dream' speech and the suicide strikes on the World Trade Center.

In the basement of the six-story structure is what the Newseum claims is the largest piece of the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall outside of Germany.

The point of the display is that radio and television broadcasts kept the hope of freedom alive behind the Iron Curtain, despite the Soviet regime's best efforts to jam the flow.

On a different floor, the history of news includes original 'news books' that were published after Johannes Gutenberg's invention of moveable type in the mid-1400s.

The visitor can pull out sealed glass trays containing these very first newspapers, including two that give conflicting accounts of the 1588 Spanish naval debacle that gave Britain primacy over the high seas. Even in those days, readers needed multiple sources to get the full picture.

For inveterate fans of old-fashioned newspapers, which pundits have declared a doomed victim of the internet, the Newseum offers hope: All along the entire Pennsylvania Avenue outside wall hang the day's front pages from mainly US newspapers.

The very top floor - where the terrace gives a spectacular glimpse of Washington's most famous landmarks - offers an even more international wellspring of hope for ink on paper.

Hanging inside are the day's front pages from countries as far flung as Estonia (Eesti Paevaleht Postimees) and Taiwan (Lien Huynh Bao) - printed out in full colour thanks, ironically, to the miracles of the internet.

The front pages reflect the local and regional imprint: The Namibian's lead headline last Friday was 'Mugabe holds Zim Hostage'; The Jerusalem Post featured 'Israel assures Syria'; The Guardian carried a banner headline on model Naomi Campbell's arrest at Heathrow Airport; and Turkey's Sabah splashed a huge soccer story across its front page.

The fallibility of news as the first draft of history even gets a place in the Newseum - in the bathrooms!

Set into the walls of the ladies' room were such bloopers as 'First female marines train for combat with men' from the Newton, Iowa, Daily News, and 'Water parasite fears move to Alberta' from The Province, a Canadian daily in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Newseum admission is 20 dollars for adults and 13 dollars for children ages 7-12.