A Night at the Newseum

A Big Bush head protest puppet top

Celebrities often have testy relationships with the tabloid newspapers and reporters that cover their every move. And nowhere was that contentiousness more apparent than between Michael Jackson and the tabloids.  When he was staying in Germany, the King of Pop came up with a unique way to express his distaste. Jackson took pillows from his hotel room, wrote "Let's Burn All Tabloids, Mountains of Them Worldwide M. J." on them, and tossed them down to the adoring fans besieging his hotel.

Last night, one of those Jackson pillows was a central component of the Newseum's private, members-only showing of the new artifacts the institution collected in 2011 for its task of telling the continuing story of news and news gathering. 

Examples of other interesting acquisitions on display included

• a broom that  an enterprising New Orleans reporter had used as a boat paddle to cover the aftermath of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Also donated by the same reporter was his pair of glasses that he broke and superglued together during his disaster reporting
• a large puppet head of President George W. Bush used by protesters at the G8 Summit in 2007
• a 1953 mockup of the dummy 1st issue of what would become Sports Illustrated
• a hand-colored Currier and Ives lithograph from the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg
• a makeshift "Yes We Camp!" sign written on cardboard and used at the Occupy DC protest
• the only 5 covers of Time magazine where a giant X appears on the cover (the 1st was the end of World II; the most recent, the announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden)
• The t-shirt bearing the slogan "Journalism Is Not a Crime" worn by the Indonesian editor of Playboy magazine when he was jailed for publishing pornography. Two issues of the extremely tame by Western standards (no nudity) copies of the Indonesian Playboy were also supplied
• actual court sketches of the murder trial of reporter Don Bolles, who was killed in the 1970s when a bomb blew up his car while he was reporting on organized crime
• a roll of Dow Jones ticker tape from November 22, 1963, the day President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas

Tales, Tidbits, and Traveling Tips
If you have interest in political comedy, you might want to plan a trip to the Newseum in 2012. Curators announced last night that a Presidential election exhibit featuring parody will be opening on President's Day weekend in February. One of the items - a moose head from a Saturday Night Live sketch involving Tina Fey portraying Sarah Palin - scheduled for the exhibit was on display tonight. Curators said the exhibit will include articles ranging from the political cartoons of Thomas Nast to items from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.