In Short Career, Yago Has Seen It All

September 11th. Hurricane Katrina. The War in Iraq. The Kashmir earthquake.

Journalist and former MTV news correspondent Gideon Yago, who spoke Thursday night at the Quick Center, has experienced these events firsthand.

“He’s been there and he’s our age,” FUSA President Hutch Williams ’08 said when he introduced Yago.

Yago said that landing the MTV job was a result of being in the right place at the right time. For seven years, he served as the first outlet to provide his generation with what was going on in the world.

Yago discussed his journey from being a college student at Columbia University, to working for MTV as a war correspondent, to his present venture of writing screenplays. However, Yago was quick to down play his accomplishments.

“I’m just a VJ,” Yago said.

Yago said that he has found his niche among young people, often mocking himself in the process.

“It’s that dork again?” said Yago. “Change the channel.”

Before the lecture, Yago sat down with The Mirror to share his experiences during his visits to Iraq and what the future holds.

Yago said he remains optimistic about the future for Generation Y. He cited the three Georgetown University students who started the Save Darfur movement by using the Internet, young adults who selflessly volunteer and the few who continue to enlist in the armed forces.

“It is a very exclusive experience and not a shared experience, which is ironic because it has so much determination of who we are as a country at large and we only ask a small portion of the country to bear the cost of that,” said Yago, who said that war is something we all experience differently.

Asked about the most difficult aspect of covering these devastating stories, Yago said, “You get to go home, and they tend to fly you business class,” not to mention how difficult it is to watch his work “be led or followed by The Real World/Road Rules Challenge or The Ashlee Simpson Show, which kind of makes your brain explode a little bit when you watch it on TV.”

MTV News is a “failed experiment,” according to Yago, because Americans don’t care about important news, and MTV no longer shows the news “10 to the hour every hour.”

He said he hopes that there will be more outlets for young people to get their news from because “they are not treated as real people” by normal media outlets.

Yago told The Mirror that he would rather profile the HIV-positive single mother for a health story than a celebrity or politician because they are not media-trained and are they real people.

Yet, his favorite people to interact with are young people.

“That’s the best part of the job,” he said. “You get to meet people your age doing really dynamic things in incredible circumstances,” said Yago.