USD Magazine, Fall 1996

About 450 media worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the filing center.

ess than an hour before the final presidential debate was to begin, USD senior Kevin Burke learned he lost his coveted position inside Shiley Theatre with Reuters news service. Instead, he spent the 90 minutes of the broadcast on the

NBC and C-SPAN - from USD's campus, nearly every student, professor and staff member had a media encounter. Countless stu– dents signed up to work with the media organizations on campus, as Burke did, and students, faculty and staff were interviewed by the score about the debate, politics and their brushes with fame. Kily Jones, secretary of Hahn University Center operations, and Antonieta Manriquez, campus scheduling coordinator, for example, were tickled to learn they appeared on NBC national news the morning following the debate. And when Jones was interviewed by NBC's affiliate in Mexico City, Mexico, she related how the debate enhanced her own personal achievement this year. Jones became a citizen in June and this election was her first. "One of my goals in life has been to vote," Jones told the reporter. "To me, this means everything." One of the most frequently interviewed USD people following the debate was Shannon McAfee '96, who was in the town hall audience and happened to be selected by Jim Lehrer to ask the first question. McAfee says she nervously stepped into the media spotlight to query the candidates, then her thoughts turned quickly to home as she sat down.

theater roof with snipers dressed in black. Philosophical but clearly disappointed about the change, Burke learned one of the first lessons about working with the media: Sometimes you get strange assignments far from the spotlight. Burke was one of Reuters' eight film runners - students who formed a human chain of sorts to get photographers' film from the theater to the dark room with minimal disruption. For Burke's length of the chain, he accepted the film through a hole cut into the theater's rooftop door and sprinted it to a student's dorm window - also at rooftop level. Another runner waiting at that window got it down to the dark room inside Camino Hall. Burke paid close attention to the Secret Service when they told him not to move unnecessarily between the film drops every 15 min– utes . "It's dark up there and they were concerned for my safety," he says. "I only saw the two snipers in the corners of the roof I was on, but I know they were everywhere."

"I thought, 'I just asked the first question,"' she recalls. "'I probably just gave my mom a heart attack.'" Noli Zosa's moment in the spotlight was spent in someone else's shoes - Bob Dole's to be exact. Zosa, a 1995 alumnus and first-year law student, volunteered for a debate assign– ment and landed a position in the CBS office. He soon discovered his assignment was one of the best since CBS served as the network pool,

When Burke got the chance to peek in the theater for five minutes, however, he took it. Unfortunately, it was the same five minutes the Secret Service was checking on him. When they couldn't find him, naturally con– cerns were raised. Burke didn't move from his post for the rest of the broadcast. Burke's story is just one of many. With about 1,500 media covering the debate or broadcasting shows - such as CNN, MS-

MS-NBC broadcast from Colachis Plaza throughout the day on Oct. 16.

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