Thursday, February 17, 2011

24/7 News

This past weekend I took a trip down to Florida to pay a visit to my grandparents. My grandfather, a man in his mid 80's, spends the majority of his day sitting on the couch with the tv on the CNN news station. As my grandfather is an elderly man, his hearing is not top quality, which means that he keeps the tv on a very high volume. With all that being said, this past weekend marked a very important point in history as on Friday, February 11, 2011, Mubarak announced that he would be stepping down as the President of Egypt.  Because the television was blaring all day, I got to hear the announcement of Mubarak's resignation minutes, if not seconds, after it was actually said. I think it's pretty incredible that at this day in age, we are able to connect to a country that is half way around the world immediately and be completely aware of the events and issues of the current times of Egypt and other foreign countries.
It also, however, made me think about the role of a journalist. One journalist was asked where she was at the time of the announcement, and she actually said she missed it because she went back to her hotel room. This made me think that with the availability of cameras on cell phones and accessibility of uploading information to websites, the role of the journalist is not as important anymore. Yes, I was able to know about the President's resignation because of CNN, but to the many other people who were not at my grandparents and did not have CNN playing all weekend, they found out just as easily online, and not necessarily by reading the New York Times or any other news website.... this is just something to think about.

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