DATE: Sunday, May 4, 1997                   TAG: 9704240560

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

NEWSEUM PUTS WITNESSES ON DISPLAY

Went to the new ``Newseum'' outside Washington, D.C., the other day and saw the Hindenberg blow up.

Twice.

Saw O.J.'s Bronco tooling down the freeway. Saw the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Saw the President shot, the Pope shot, the Challenger exploded.

It was a pyrotechnic kaleidoscope of eclectic imagery, a high-tech 72,000-square-foot Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey spreadsheet on the human condition, wall on wall of moving pictures and prose.

The domed three-story Newseum, located in Arlington across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial, is a $50 million shrine to journalism funded by the nonprofit Freedom Foundation. The place still smelled of fresh paint when I went on an advance tour last month. On the edge of the official opening, my busload of seniors and students found itself being interviewed by swarms of print and television reporters feverishly covering the attraction's onset.

So we were able to watch journalists watch us watch the exhibits watch the world.

Talk about a cloud of witnesses.

Here we saw reference on high-definition video to photographer-moviemaker Gordon Parks, who once sat in a limo with a militant Black Panther in Oakland, Calif., and observed to the pistol-packing passenger:

``You have a .45 automatic in your lap. I have a .35 mm. camera on mine. I think my instrument is as powerful as yours.''

We also saw the grizzled but urbane talking head of former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, speaking again and again and again by recorded sound bite of the newspaper's error in printing Janet Cooke's bogus Pulitzer Prize-winning story and its culminating lesson:

``If you screw up, come clean.''

And there was the Look magazine portrait of playwright Noel Coward, complete with martini and tux, photographed in the Nevada desert to illustrate his observation that only ``mad dogs and Englishmen come out in the noonday sun.''

His long shadow clearly marked the hour as later.

Haste, error and correction. What other line of work is so committed to letting it all hang out? Not only the warts; X-rays of the warts, biopsies, full-color enlargements.

BABY-FACE SHOT DEAD.

Explained herein are the workings of the camera smuggled into Ruth Snyder's electric-chair execution chamber by an enterprising reporter who triggered it near his toe.

Opportunities are provided at the Newseum for visitors to do our own teleprompted stand-ups before a photo of Capitol Hill and to take the videos home, for a $15 fee. We are also offered interactive computer opportunities to perform as in-your-face reporters and editors. We can buy stuffed-bear scribes and NBC ball caps in the gift shop.

The emergent epiphany: What's new?

Modern media have long since made seasoned voyeurs-cum-critics of us all. We've come some distance since ``The Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze.'' Since Uncle Walter; since Dan and Connie.

Showbiz drives the newsbiz, especially here.

But like too much CNN absorbed over an enforced immobility, the Newseum can numb us brainless.

What - another earthquake?

We're stone flat jaded.

Wiley Miller's ``Non Sequitur'' comic strip recently placed newspapers in drugstores among ``sleeping aids.'' Circulations are dramatically down. So are network news ratings.

The Newseum features a 126-foot-long video wall ``where you will experience breaking news as it happens.''

That's a fair description of the street outside, if anyone is looking. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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