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Wednesday 3 December 2008

Diary

Alexander Chancellor returns from New York

The man who followed him up the building was a New Yorker with little experience, Renaldo Clarke, 32, who found the climb more of a struggle. At the 41st floor, he wearily mouthed through the plate glass, ‘What floor am I on?’, and a Times journalist inside spelled out ‘41’ on his fingers. Mr Clarke looked downhearted, but made it to the top nevertheless. His message, emblazoned on a T-shirt, was ‘Malaria no more’. The New York Times is both pro-green and anti-malaria, so doesn’t deserve to be picked on by advocates of either cause. But people who go ‘buildering’ like it for the thrills and fame it brings, and seem only as an afterthought to dignify it with a mission. They would have been more convincing if, in scaling the New York Times building, they had claimed that their purpose was to bring joy into the lives of unhappy workers in a dying industry, for in that they certainly succeeded.

Well, maybe the press is not really dying, but it’s a bad sign when vast new monuments are built to it. The latest such extravaganza is the ‘Newseum’ in Washington DC which opened this April on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Sponsored by, among others, the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it cost $450 million and is one of the most lavishly appointed and overstaffed museums I have ever seen. Its purpose is to impress upon the public the importance of a free press, and I was glad to see that one of its ‘core messages’ is that ‘freedom includes the right to be outrageous’. It contains seven levels of galleries, theatres and high-tech interactive exhibits, all designed to show the world what a great job journalists do (though the only bit that really interested me was the display of newspaper front pages, which showed how little papers have really changed over the past 300 years). The Newseum also commemorates more than 1,800 reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died in the line of duty, their names etched on soaring, two-storey glass panels. (‘Reporting the story can be dangerous’ is another of its core messages.)

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