Traditional War Event, Kenya, Africa

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-World War II 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.