Emma Meyhofer: Views

“Out of many, one” or “E pluribus unum” as said throughout America, is something that everyone values in the United States whether you are a journalist or not. This is not something only the Capitol values, but many Americans do, but some take our free country for granted.

Throughout the trip of D.C., on our very last day visiting, we took the tour in the Capitol building, and in the tour we learned what it is like to be united as one country, and the history throughout time is shown throughout anyone’s perspective, or view. The view of D.C. is definitely different than from the view we all see in Pittsburgh. Not only geographically, but socially and economically. I found it interesting how different the view of D.C. is from Pittsburgh this trip specifically, because I have been to Washington, D.C. before. We toured many museums and sights that I have not seen before, and the way I, and the rest of the group saw them, we were mostly seeing them in the eyes of a journalist. To me, D.C. is the perfect place to expand the journalism profession, and from the voices of everyone we had met like Tony Fratto or the many tour guides that were kind enough to tour us around explained this well. In America, we take for granted how lucky we are to have things like free press, and it was important to remember that. One of the museums we toured was called the Newseum, and throughout history the museum easily showed how much the study of journalism has changed over the course of the years and it was very interesting.

Being in the eye’s view of a journalist in D.C, it was also influential to see the different views of the actual city as well. It really is a beautiful city and there is a lot of history throughout it. We would walk the streets everyday to go anywhere, and you can’t do that a lot here in Pittsburgh. I find that very interesting and the overall experience for me was better because there wasn’t a lot of driving and it was all about enjoying the view we had and not sitting in traffic. Washington, D.C. is full of history and almost everywhere you looked there was something beautiful.

North Allegheny Intermediate High School NA Eye’s team trip to D.C. was definitely a huge success in the views of us journalists. Everyone probably had many different ways on how they viewed the trip but to me the trip taught us journalists how fortunate we are to have a free country, especially with our right of free of speech. Many of us are all writers, largely with social media. This is why the way anyone views the world, whether they are in Washington D.C. or not, that we should be thankful for the country we have, and all the different views of life it has given us.