WASHINGTON, DC - Look through the glass walls of a television studio at the Newseum — the much-heralded $450 million museum created by, for and about news acolytes, news reporters, newshounds, newsreaders, news watchers, newsmakers and news advocates that opened on Friday — and you get an imposing view of the Capitol. But that also means that from the Capitol you also have a clear view of the glass facade of the Newseum, which is part of the point. The Newseum also  includes a memorial to journalists who died on the job.

This museum is determined to be noticed. It is across the way from the National Gallery of Art and down the street from the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue. It also lies along the presidential inaugural path leading to the White House. And though privately built — it was created by the Freedom Forum with substantial contributions from a wide array of news organizations — it presents itself as if, like its neighbors, it were a public institution with National in its name. It lays claim to the public interest and then insists upon it. Its glass facade includes a 74-foot-high, 50-ton marble tablet scripturally inscribed with the complete text of the First Amendment.

Step inside the building, designed by Polshek Partnership Architects, and the clamor for attention only increases. The 90-foot-high atrium features a 40-foot-by-22-foot high-definition monitor that can be raised or lowered, brightened or dimmed, displaying museum happenings, broadcasting studio events or historical footage. Nearby a news helicopter hangs in midair.

Exhibition spaces boast pieces of the Berlin Wall, a mangled broadcast antenna from the World Trade Center’s ruins, a blogger’s slippers and Mark Twain’s inkwell. Two of the museum’s seven levels hold souvenir shops. (For sale is a nightshirt declaring, “Not tonight, dear ... I’m on deadline.”)

The history of the press is laid out in an extensive timeline of documents and objects, including a 1603 English broadsheet showing the coronation of James I; a 1787 copy of The Maryland Gazette containing the new United States Constitution; The Charleston Mercury’s 1860 extra enthusiastically proclaiming, “The Union Is Dissolved!”; a copy of the 1948 Chicago Daily Tribune mistakenly announcing, “Dewey Beats Truman,” just below the photograph of a victorious Harry S. Truman holding the same paper. There are samplings of radio and television broadcasts and an “interactive newsroom,” in which those who are not camera-shy can pretend to be television reporters.

There’s also a “4-D” movie theater celebrating courageous journalists in which viewers wear glasses that make it seem as if bubbles containing Marilyn Monroe or the World Trade Center or other newsworthy subjects are floating toward your face. Special seats vibrate with Luftwaffe attacks during the London blitz or blow puffs of air meant to simulate rats scurrying around the lunatic asylum where Nellie Bly gathered material for her 19th-century exposé in The New York World.

The Newseum, which used to be in a modest space in Arlington, Va., charges $20 for adult admission, has a $50 million operating budget this year and is unembarrassed about marshaling the considerable financial resources of the Freedom Forum. That organization, devoted to the ideals of a free press and free speech, is a successor to a foundation established in 1935 by the newspaper publisher Frank E. Gannett. (The Newseum has also received substantial grants from organizations, including the Knight Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, ABC News, The New York Times Company and the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which controls the Times Company.)

The Newseum has created a publicity-seeking monument to the news business, its history and its hyperlinked future. The museum demands attention with almost tabloid ferocity. Six years of planning! 250,000 square feet! 100,000 words of text! 81,000 pounds of artifacts! 35,000 front pages in the collection! 6,214 artifacts (not counting photos and newspapers)! 131 interactive video monitors, 99 television sets, 40 typewriters, 28 reporter notepads, 15 theaters!  It is as if an overstuffed newspaper Sunday supplement from the not-so-distant past had suddenly morphed into a sound-and-light display.

A good portion of the museum’s earnestly sought attention is well deserved. Courtesy of the deft exhibitions created by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the Newseum is an appealing example of how a museum can both teach and entertain with clever use of images, interactive displays and compact explanations that will repay serious reading while offering edutainment to the many schoolchildren expected to visit. The exhibition about 9/11, with its wall of front pages from around the world on Sept. 12, 2001, and its film recounting the experiences of journalists covering the event, deals with wounds so fresh, a box of tissues is made available.

Along with the many testimonials to journalistic courage and a memorial to journalists who lost their lives on the job, there are examples of distortions that mar the profession: the frauds perpetrated by a Pulitzer Prize winner or by a trusted reporter; the distorted reporting that led The Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky., to acknowledge in 2004 that in the 1960s it had given the “front-page news” of the civil rights movement “back-page coverage”; or even Peter Arnett’s 1991 broadcast on CNN that seemingly swallowed the Saddam Hussein government’s account of the United States having bombed a “baby-milk plant.” Only Mark Twain (who invented his share of journalistic hoaxes) had a plausible excuse: Reporting, he said, was “awful slavery for a lazy man.”

It is fitting too to stress the importance of the First Amendment since with it, as the museum says, the United States “became the first country in the history of the world to acknowledge the right to press freedom in its constitution.” The cliché is that freedom of the press is a “cornerstone of democracy,” as the museum puts it, but it also true. One exhibition cites Thomas Jefferson’s comment in 1787 that if given a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

The Newseum is so intent on promoting the idea of a free press that it blurs such distinctions and succumbs to a familiar and exaggerated form of press self-regard, cloaking the press in a virtuous mantle of public service. The idea is that the press has a mission to “do good,” to change the world for the better. A related idea: When great good does happen, the press has played a major role. That may be why major exhibition space here is devoted to several sections of the Berlin Wall. The accompanying explanation suggests that a free press weakened that wall’s foundations: “The Soviets could not stop the flow of news into East Berlin from West German radio and television.” But is that really what brought down the wall?

These issues are not really explored by the Newseum. But to see the daily struggle with accuracy and understanding, to watch moral visions being challenged and reshaped in different ways, take a look at one of the most intriguing galleries at the Newseum, reproduced in sidewalk displays. Every day about 80 front pages from newspapers around the world and from the 50 states are mounted. (They are also posted online at newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/.) Here the press can be seen for what it is: an often noble, always necessary and inevitably fallible enterprise.

By . . .Edward Rothstein