The sometimes media critic writes on his thoughts about the $450 million temple to the news biz that recently opened in Washington, D.C.

From the Globe and Mail: (paywalled to non-G&M Insiders)

... There's lots Canadian in the Newseum. It draws on satires of news like Saturday Night Live that reflect the influence of a Canadian sense of familiarity yet distance toward U.S. culture. It has splendid displays on the rise of print - a topic brilliantly explored by Canadian historian Harold Innis, who was one of the founders of modern media theory, and by his (IMHO) lesser successor, Marshall McLuhan.

A Toronto firm, Kubik, even built the countless Newseum displays. Kubik's Sam Kohn explains that three modules make up the building: The first looks out on Penn Avenue. The two behind it fold into each other like pages in a newspaper. Once he points this out, it really feels that way. I'm inside a newspaper, writing about the news, for a newspaper. Weird. ...

There's a real page from a Gutenberg Bible, which takes my breath away, and then, a level below, a model of an early printing press. Now, it seems to me, we're really talking about the Birth of the News.

I've been obsessed with the role of print since I first read Mr. Innis's thoughts on the crucial divide between the oral and written traditions. For millennia, he says, civilizations teetered productively between the two very different ways of exploring reality - a little of this, a little of that - but with the invention of the printing press, the balance swung decisively toward the written and has never been restored.

I've devoured books about this, taught courses on it, written of it (probably far too often) when I had a media column in The Globe and Mail, and even pondered my choice to become a writer in its light. But nothing ever clarified for me the power and nature of print like the displays in the cavernous "history of news" gallery at the Newseum. ...

One of the big Newseum funders is Al Neuwarth, the alpha dog of Gannett.

Mr. Neuharth wants the tourists to leave as better-informed citizens. Well, they may be better informed. But that doesn't necessarily make them better citizens. What does a citizen need? Not endless information but space and time in which to contemplate the information they have and formulate a response. That may not be journalism's responsibility, maybe its task is the inform component. But in a place like Newseum, and in journalism generally, there's so much information that it's almost impossible for citizens to reflect, and rarely a hint of a hint that they ought to. The sheer bulk of information tends to render them mute and vulnerable. There are times when less (informed) may be better.

What the museum-ish atmosphere of Newseum lets you do is ponder these problematic aspects of news and information. The experience suggests that news isn't just information, it's also distraction. I'm not saying it's intentional. It doesn't really matter, that's the result. News sucks you in because you care about things like politics, history and social justice; then news distracts you by yammering about them so divertingly that you can easily forget about dealing with them. And what a clever way to distract you from the world and the parts of it that affect you fatefully: with tales and images from the world itself. The way news distracts people from thinking about the information they've just been given is by giving them more. There's always more, as there is in the Newseum, where signs say: "Attention, news junkies" - and then direct you to the shops. Being there really is like wandering around a colossal newspaper.

Then, next morning back at the hotel, USA Today is outside the door, with Harrison Ford and Sarah Jessica Parker and a footballer pointing in your face, along with "Iraqi forces lacking" and "Video games under fire." It's not that some of it is trite and some heavy; it's that absence of opportunity to reflect. Is it a surprise that Al Neuharth also created USA Today, whose owner, Gannett Corporation, is Newseum's big funder?

There is one section of the Newseum, where Pulitzer Prize-winning photos are displayed, that does clear a little space for contemplation. A Buddhist moment. Maybe it's because they're stills, in black and white. "Lost Child" - a couple stares forlornly from the beach into the brutal ocean. "Fatal Fire" - a fire fighter holds a dead kid. There's no real push to move on from these, they invite consideration and stillness. Maybe it's just because they're tucked into an odd, unadorned corner of the place, out of the relentless flow.

What if the Newseum gave you that kind of space to contemplate all its busy doings? Then it wouldn't be the Newseum, it would be the News and Space museum (to go with the Air and Space museum over on the mall, ho-ho). What about strategically placed alcoves, halting the flow, where you could sit and think about what you just saw, judge and absorb it? Maybe after the news on TV, there should be a mandatory period of silence and blank screen so people can think about what's going on. And papers should have empty pages inviting you to ponder what you read, or scribble your own responses.

I don't think more analysis or opinion are required along with the "straight" news. There's already plenty of that in the press and I don't believe it assists citizenship in the way the Newseum says it wants to do. Mr. Innis would have said journalism and the print tradition are democracy's enemies because democracy (in the classical, Greek sense) requires the oral process, with its slowness, complexity and human interaction. That's where citizenship takes root, not by imbibing vast gobs of information.

We live at a time when newspapers are panicky, if not about their actual extinction then at least about maintaining their previously normal, abnormal levels of profit. So it's a suitably anxious time to embalm the species in a mausoleum. But news will also persist, with or without the papers, which long ago set the parameters for any versions of it to come in the future. Either way, it seems like an apt time for a Newseum.