If the name of Robert R. McCormick does not exactly resonate these days, there’s a good reason for it: he was a newspaper proprietor and, by contemporary standards, very much on the wrong side of history’s street. A benevolent autocrat, whose views were reflected in the pages of his product, the Chicago Tribune, he was an isolationist in the middle of the American Century, implacable enemy of the burgeoning welfare state, and a “character” inhabiting the corporate world, who wielded power and exerted much influence. And yet, outside his Midwestern domain, he is now largely forgotten and, if remembered, much misunderstood.

Let this be a lesson to all journalists with pretensions. Across the Potomac River from Washington, another eccentric newspaper proprietor, Allen Neuharth, has just opened a museum—with the ghastly, if inevitable, name of Newseum—which seeks to attach some form of immortality to reporters and editors. This is, to say the least, an exercise in futility. For even in the midst of its wide-screen exhibits and flashy memorabilia, the Newseum subsists on the subject of the news, not the nature of the product, or the people who print and broadcast information.

In literature, journalists may be counted on the fingers of a single, dismembered hand; in history, journalists barely register at all. They are famous, sometimes notorious, in their day; but with very few exceptions, once time marches on and the newsprint turns yellow, their monuments are covered, like Ozymandias’s, by lone and level sands.