November 9, 2019 marks the 30 th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. East German authorities put the wall up in 1961 to prevent the mass migration of east Germans citizens to the Allied-controlled region.
Indiana University Media School professor, Elaine Monaghan, was a student in West Berlin when the wall came down. She remembers talking with her roommates in their apartment when the travel ban from East to West Berlin was lifted.
“We were all kind of scratching our heads and saying, this is obviously really important. Travel restrictions have been lifted," she says. "We didn’t really comprehend it, and then we all woke up in the morning going, ‘oh my gosh.’”
Indiana University TV news historian and professor, Mike Conway researched how news was affected by the Berlin Wall and the Cold War Era.
“At the time when tv is becoming big, the wall was this very visual thing,” he says.
Conway says TV news coverage contributed to making the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbol for the end of the Cold War.
