This Just In: AP Makes History By Frank Ahrens Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 21, 1998; Page D01

Marines raise the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima after the fierce battle of Feb. 23, 1945. (Joe Rosenthal/AP)

Eager to keep down the rising cost of transmitting news by telegraph from more distant ports, six of New York's newspapers in 1848 founded the Harbor News Association, a collective service that employed a pool of reporters filing stories that each paper could use. Shortly after, it was renamed the New York City Associated Press. Since then, Associated Press reporters and photographers have been ground-zero witnesses to history, filing their tersely worded, legendarily fast and accurate dispatches and pictures to news outlets around the world.

"Flash! The Associated Press Covers the World," a gallery full of notable AP photos, archives and documents, opens today at the Newseum in Arlington and will run through April 5. Almost all of the photos and artifacts underline the reporter's belief that journalism is the first rough draft of history. This exhibit is a compressed, and stirring, account of the past 150 years. But the AP has been significant in another way: It was a leader in changing the modern newspaper from a political tract to a recounting of events.

Unlike today, when most mainstream news organizations try to practice objectivity, 19th-century newspapers were as partisan – and at least as influential – as political parties. To keep their ideologically disparate clients happy, AP reporters and editors developed a facts-only style of reporting events and left the spin up to the yellow journalists' screaming editorial pages.

AP reporters became the high priests of objectivity. Washington correspondent Lawrence Gobright said, in 1861: "My instructions do not allow me to make any comment upon the facts." It is an asceticism that AP professes, even today, as it plows through a sea of analytical and interpretive journalism.

From the start, AP news stories were staccato bursts of hard facts, written with a purposeful artlessness.

In short sentences.

And paragraphs.

That get to newspapers really fast.

For instance, reporters left yesterday's exhibit around 3 p.m. At 5:48 p.m., the AP put its story on the wire, zipping it to more than 1,700 subscribing papers worldwide.

AP invented a new form of direct communication that shot through the often flowery prose of the 19th century. Some accounts of President Lincoln's assassination, for instance, waxed lyrical about the president and first lady's night at the theater, the play they saw and so on. Eventually, the reader got to the fact that he was shot. Dead. The AP's dispatch read:

"Washington – The President was shot in a theatre tonight and perhaps mortally wounded."

After the Civil War, plagued by unreliable telegraph wires that continually interrupted news transmissions, the AP invented the "inverted pyramid" news story. The questions Who? What? Why? Where? When? had to be answered at the beginning of the story; everything else was secondary.

True to AP form, yesterday's exhibit had a news peg. Terry Anderson, the Associated Press's former chief Middle East correspondent who was kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985 and held hostage for six years, made a donation to the show: a rosary he made from beads, copper wire and carpet thread while in captivity.

Along the gallery wall are color and black-and-white photographs from AP photographers, chronicling the 20th century. It is striking how many have become iconic images: The raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. The Hindenburg descending in flames. "Dewey Defeats Truman." The suspected Viet Cong soldier being shot in the head. The naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm fire. Marilyn Monroe's skirt blowing up. Each picture has an explanatory legend and, when possible, the name of the photographer. Which is nice, as many AP photographers – accustomed to seeing only an "Associated Press" credit line under their pictures – grumble that "AP" stands for "Anonymous Photographer."

Across from the photographs is a continuously running film trailer for a 40-minute documentary on the history of the Associated Press, which will run several times a day in a Newseum theater. Displayed throughout the gallery are artifacts, such as a telegraph transmitter, and modern touches, such as interactive computer screens that allow visitors to listen to AP reporters, editors and executives tell war stories and laud their employer.

Missing from the exhibit – though extensively reported in the Newseum's nearby permanent display of media history – is an account of the bloody competition that left AP the dominant wire service and United Press International, once an equal of AP, barely breathing. No journalistic rivalry in this century was fiercer than that between AP and UPI reporters trying to beat each other to the same story. In the car following President Kennedy through Dallas, for instance, there was an AP reporter, a UPI reporter and one telephone. As soon as Kennedy was shot, the UPI reporter – Merriman Smith – grabbed the phone and filed his story. Then, he cradled the phone to his chest to prevent the AP reporter from filing his account.

In one gallery the Newseum usually posts daily copies of more than 80 domestic and foreign newspapers. But yesterday museum officials had left up last Sunday's papers to make a point about the AP's ubiquity: The wire service's account of President Clinton's deposition in the Paula Jones case was the lead story in most papers. When the assembled media were told this, one UPI old-timer leaned forward and whispered to another:

"It wouldn't be that way if we were still around."