The senior media writer at Politico hailed the possible sale of the Newseum building in Washington, declaring the "guilded monument to journalistic vanity" will have "deserved its death."
In an opinion piece for the outlet, Jack Shafer derided the 15-year-old, $450 million museum's exhibits as "the detritus from a flea market" – from the Watergate break-in door, Tim Russert's office, posters and reporters' notebooks from the Ferguson protests to props and costumes from "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy."
"Exactly how random curios like these tell the story of journalism has been the Newseum's conceptual problem from the day it opened its doors," he argued. "You can't drop the history of news in a box like you can the airplanes and rockets in the neighboring National Air and Space Museum. Journalism is a living thing, like an ocean tide — its energies dissipate when sealed in Lucite for display."
If the Newseum "goes down," Shafer wrote, "it will have deserved its death. Truth be told, it never deserved birth."
"When the Newseum opened in 2008, I urged the [building owners] Freedom Forum sell the space at the earliest opportunity and spend the proceeds on producing journalism today, not preserving journalism from the past," he wrote. "My advice still holds."
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