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Media Event




  Url http://wwwbartlebycom/61/89/M0188900html
  Author The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
  Title media event
  Language English
  Accessdate 2006-09-15


The element of immediacy (as in ", used for DTH television broadcasting in Europe. Civilian satellite links utilized by outlets such as CNN , BBC , Al Jazeera , the Russian NTV station, all three major U.S. broadcast companies, and many others, have been crucial in delivering immediate, immersive live news from any point on earth to any other.]] -->

Media events in the serious contemporary sense of the term have been happening roughly since the early 1940s, when the ubiquity of movie-house Newsreels joined with the established presence of newspapers and commercial Radio to form a communications convergence able to give the man-or-woman-on-the-street the sense that everywhere he or she looked or listened, the same "story" was before them. This media saturation was greatly furthered by Television , invented in the late 1920s and reaching millions of households by 1950. Starting around 1980 , 24-hour Cable Television news operations debuted with great fanfare, with their signature use of new civilian satellite links that made on-camera Realtime or near-realtime reporting from almost any spot on earth feasible while the event was still underway or its immediate aftermath continued to affect those involved. Finally, the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1994, allowing for instant global reporting, debating, Polling and Blogging , completed the communications environment of today, wherein a media event of global significance, or even one of limited geographical scope but consisting of particularly unusual or affecting content, can literally claim the time and attention of most of the world's people as events unfold.

The coverage of global and national media events has become a pillar of large news organizations, which often operate at scant profitability in-between these major occurrences. Public opinion, and even baseline attitudes of one culture towards another, can be largely determined by what is seen and heard during a major media event, and the entire careers of journalists can be made (or un-made) by their conduct during these iconic situations. In the United States , the first full bore post-WWII media event was the 1963 Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy , and it, to a great extent, determined the unwritten hierarchy of American journalists and "news personalities" for the succeeding 40 years. The development of " Glasnost " and the ensuing fall of Communism in Russia was a similar determinant for journalists there.

Parallel instances for almost every nation or region can be found, with the major media event corresponding to the shared memory of a "defining moment" often felt in personal, yet nationalistic, terms. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989 was such a moment for Germans on both sides; the resolution of the Chinese Civil War in 1950 still resounds in that nation; the achievement of independence from Great Britain in 1980 by Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) was a defining moment which dominated news reporting on several continents at the time; the invasion, starting on March 20, 2003, that deposed Iraq 's Saddam Hussein was one of the few modern media events capturing the attention of a majority of the planet's adults and will likely be commemorated in Iraq, in celebration or infamy, for generations, accompanied by news footage first transmitted that day. The distinguishing characteristic of all these is a day or other short period of time during which changes of great importance came to a head, lending themselves to breaking news-style media coverage.


REFERENCES





GENERAL SOURCES

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)


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