The C-SPAN Bus Visits DSU – Students on Morning Show

9/27/13

DSU received a visit on Sept. 25 by the C-SPAN Bus and engaged a select group of students to participate in its nationally broadcasted morning show “The Washington Journal.”

The nine DSU students – a mix of political science and mass communication majors – were led onto the bus at about 8 a.m. to prepare for the show’s 8:30 a.m. broadcast, which on that day focused on the ongoing debt ceiling issue and the possible government shutdown.

The guest on that 15-minute morning segment was U.S. Rep. John Delaney, D-Maryland, who is a member of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee and the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. During the broadcast, the students on the bus were connected to The Washington Journal via Skype, which allowed them to pose questions to the congressman.

To view that segment of The Washington Journal, go to http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Delaney.

Dr. Akwasi Osei, chair of the DSU Department of Political Science, invited the C-SPAN bus to DSU. He said it was a way of helping the students take the political science material presented in the classroom and make it relevant by connecting it with their everyday lives.

“This is what the C-SPAN Bus visit to our campus did for our students – it brought politics and government right up to their campus,” Dr. Osei said. “Students were able to, in real-time, connect to lawmaking and policy enforcement as they asked a sitting US Congressman pertinent questions about topical issues such as the potential government shutdown, the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), and the raising of the country’s debt ceiling.”

C-SPAN, an acronym for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, is a private, nonprofit American cable television network created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a public service that televises many proceedings of the federal government as well as other public affairs programming. The C-SPAN network includes three television channels (C-SPAN, C-SPAN2 and C-SPAN3), one radio station and a group of websites that provide “streaming media” and archives of C-SPAN programs. C-SPAN's television channels are available to approximately 100 million cable and satellite households within the United States.