EDWARD R. MURROW SLEPT HERE

By ANDREW FERGUSON

The Newseum--an interactive museum dedicated to the history of journalism and (evidently) the propagation of stupid puns--just opened in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from Washington. There was a lot of fanfare, as there always is when journalists gather to celebrate themselves. The Freedom Forum sank $50 million into the Newseum, and it shows. You can't turn around without bumping into some shiny chunk of high-tech hardware: touch-screen computers, Cinerama-style theaters and a video wall so large--126 ft. long, 10 1/2 ft. high--that it could theoretically accommodate 300 couch potatoes at the same time. Reporters love the Newseum, of course, but so do the schoolkids who come by the busload. This is more than just a tourist trap; it is a $50 million testament to the terrifying insecurity that lurks at the heart of American journalism.

Insecurity? Nobody believes me when I say this, but journalists have been the single most insecure group of human beings since God, as a gag, invented the Chicago Cubs. Nobody believes me when I say this because (I'll concede) it seems absurd. Peter Jennings, whose haircut costs more than your monthly car payment, insecure? Diane Sawyer, whose haircut costs more than Peter Jennings' monthly car payment, unsure of herself? All those reporters who race to the scene of an airplane crash and shove their tape recorders in the faces of the survivors and ask them how they feel--those rude and ravenous news vultures are really quivering Jell-O molds of unease and self-doubt? Even Mike Wallace?

Yes, yes, yes to all of the above. This isn't a plea for sympathy; along with their self-doubt, journalists are given to insufferable vanity and sanctimony. And if you're like most Americans, you despise them for it. But look a little closer, and see the newsreader's eyes widen when the TelePrompTer starts to stutter, or see the slight tremble in the hand that holds the notepad when the survivors tell the reporter to mind his own damn business. Look a little closer, and then the jig is up. Somewhere in the dim recesses of the journalistic soul lies the horrible suspicion: this is really a pretty shallow--and maybe unseemly--way for a grownup to make a living.

As a consequence, American journalism makes extravagant gestures of self-justification. Undergraduate journalism schools, for example, take four years to teach a skill--writing a news story--that most people, even undergraduates, can learn in a week; this perpetuates the fiction that journalism is a profession like lawyering rather than a trade like plumbing. Huge nonprofit institutions such as the Freedom Forum have been created in the press's quest to analyze itself. Daily they convene media panels, in which a couple of reporters and a journalism professor sit before an audience and chew over subjects like "Everybody Thinks We're Scum, and No Wonder: Reflections on Public Mistrust of the Media." Grimly, the nonprofits commission polls to take the public's temperature, and the results are unvarying: reporters rank somewhere below concentration-camp guards, nobody believes what he reads in the newspaper, and so on. And the results are then duly reported in (of course) the newspaper.

Am I alone in finding something touching in all this? Maybe so, for as you wander through the Newseum, it's clear that you're not supposed to be moved but wowed. Here is Mark Twain's corncob pipe, there's Charles Dickens' pen. A Gutenberg Bible is mere yards away from the microphone that broadcast Edward R. Murrow's reports from the Blitz. The implication is unmistakable: a long, honored history undergirds the journalist's "craft" (as journalists insist on calling it), ennobling it, raising it up, endowing it with greatness. Interactive displays show you how to write a news story against deadline, to convince you (finally!) that being a reporter is no day at the beach, thank you very much. And if you're still not convinced, an "opinion center" has been set up too, complete with video camera, so visitors can tell the journalists who run the Newseum how much they hate them.

Perhaps I'm wrong in my interpretation; perhaps the elaborate infrastructure journalism has constructed around itself is evidence not of self-doubt but of self-aggrandizement. The two often work together, after all. But try to imagine any other trade (or profession) going to such lengths to justify itself to its customers. Is there a Cal Worthington Foundation to underwrite panels of used-car salesmen discussing "Odometer Tampering: How Far Can We Go"? Have personal-injury lawyers built a museum to house the most famous ambulances ever chased?

Cut the trade some slack. Hanging in the Newseum's atrium are hundreds of newspaper mottoes, and one in particular, from the Blackshear (Ga.) Times, catches the eye: "Liked by Many, Cussed by Some, Read by Them All." This is clever, and journalists will chuckle, but it is mere bluster. Journalists don't want to be cussed. They want to report the news and expose wrongdoing. They want to cast light into the shadowy corners of the world. But mostly they want to be loved. Even Mike Wallace.