September 21, 2006

Historical Society takes on media history, bloggers

Hear this, political bloggers. You're a museum piece.

The New-York Historical Society this week opened "Suspicious Truths: Politics and the Press in American History" and bloggers have a place in the show.

The small one-room exhibition focuses on the earliest political papers in the United States, but draws a few parallels to today's political bloggers. The bloggers first get a mention with the rise of the penny press in the 1830s whose editors took on popular topics such as "abolition, temperance, prison reform, women's rights - with the earnestness of today's bloggers."

Later, they are labeled "the new pamphleteers" in a video interview with Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. "When there's something they can jump on, they can have an effect by insisting the world pays attention to it," Lemann said. Though he also warns of the problem of opinion becoming more prevalent than reporting.

The video clip plays in a loop in one corner of the room, which also holds several historic newspapers, Horace Greeley's desk and a hand-written letter from Thomas Jefferson, whose views of the free press changed as the medium evolved, as did his job title.

For example in 1787, Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

But by the time he's president he has this to say: "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them," and "(t)ruth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."

"Suspicious Truths" is on display through Dec. 17 at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, map. There is also an October 10 public discussion, "New York and the News: Three Voices," with Clyde Haberman of the New York Times, Eric Burns of Fox News Channel and Michael Schudson of Columbia's journalism school.

September 21, 2006 01:12 PM in Museums, Techology, Upper West Side

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