JAY ROSEN SPEAKING ON THE WINTER IS COMING: THE TRUMP

REGIME AND THE AMERICAN PRESS LECTURE HELD AT

THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN.

Coming from an outsider’s point of view, I never thought about how the press could be so heavily affected by the Trump Regime until hearing the lecture from Jay Rosen, a NYU Journalism Professor. Rosen listed twenty points explaining how the press was negatively impacted and one really stuck with me. There is no way to fact check him because he will blow it over and move around it. When questions are asked, he will either ignore it or answer what he wants to answer, which doesn’t actually answer the question. With this, it makes it so difficult for journalists to write the truth and to present something to the public because they have no real answers. We can’t force Trump to say anything since it’s his right to have his Freedom of Speech, but to hide the truth makes it inefficient to run a country. When checks and balances were created, were there not enough? There seems to be a huge gap between the government and the people at the moment and the connection was the press. With the press struggling to get the truth and being able to work, there is a larger and larger divide being created. Although Winter is coming for the press, the people are the ones who will get buried in the snow.

Education is a privilege, but in the United States we don’t necessarily treat it as one and most would rather sleep or skip class. In other countries, some people can’t get a proper education and would wish for nothing more than to be in school. According to On Women’s Day, take the next step for girls’ education, written by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, for many Syrian children, “getting an education is a matter of life and death.” Even with this striking impression the “international aid to education has fallen from 12 to 10%” and has left many feeling helpless.

Even with this discouraging statistic, there are still some who are advocating for better education and specifically education for refugees. In a video on Malala’s Fight for Education, reported by Jomana Karadsheh, Malala Yousafzai, a young, Nobel Peace Prize Winner opened an all girls school in Lebanon for Syrian refugees. She is “providing secondary education and skills training for two hundred Syrian girls” and advocating for those who seem to be “ignored.” With activists like Malala, the fight for education seems to grow brighter and advocating for those who need help seems louder.