Last Updated: March 27, 2000
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Looking back
On being a busybody for 50 years
Newspapers and journalism education have afforded me
wonderful opportunities to poke around other people’s business
By Gilbert Cranberg
It has now been 50 years since I first set foot in Iowa. Those 50 years
have all been spent in journalism, first at The Des Moines Register, then
the University of Iowa.
The Register was a great paper, and I had a great job. One of my kids,
who was then eight or so, came to me one day and said so-and-so says his
father is a fireman, and another says his father is a doctor and someone
else says his father sells insurance; my friends at school ask me what
you do and I don’t know what to tell them. Tell me, what do you do? I explained
that we have a president, and senators and representatives and a governor
and a mayor and judges and a police chief and people who run the schools,
collect garbage, fix the streets and so on. But none of those people knows
how to do those jobs right. What I do is tell them how to do it right.
My son seemed quite pleased and proud about that.
After 33 years of being an all-around busybody and pest, and just when
it seemed everybody had received maximum benefit from my instruction and
there was no further room for improvement, I was asked if I would teach
at the J-school. That seemed like a wonderful opportunity to straighten
out the school, not to mention the university, and if I haven’t succeeded
over the past 17 years it must be because I’m only there part time.
And what are the rewards, frustrations and surprises of moving from
a newspaper to the classroom? One of the biggest differences is that at
the paper, although it was very good, minimal time was spent discussing
the ethical dimensions of what we did. We absorbed such things as how to
be fair and responsible through osmosis — observing what colleagues said
and did. I guess that was in part because it was assumed everyone knew
right from wrong, but also because the overriding preoccupation was on
getting the paper out, so what to cover and comment on took far greater
precedence than reflecting on journalistic values. I suspect that still
is true most places.
A great strength of academia is that journalistic values are not slighted.
If students don’t know the journalistic equivalent of the Ten Commandments
by the time they graduate, they’ve been goofing off.
Journalism is important, perhaps never more so. At a time when the public
is awash with docudramas, films that fictionalize real events and biographies
that take liberties with the facts, the public needs sources of information
it can trust. Press performance sometimes falls short, but the mainstream
press is committed as an institution to the goals of truth and accuracy,
to telling the story, as much as humanly possible, like it is.
That commitment comes in no small part from the training J-schools provide.
So I was especially gratified the other day to have a student articulate
that. In my course, I ask students to read a variety of materials and to
submit summaries, along with any comments. They were asked in this particular
assignment to read a number of ethics codes. After reading them, one student
wrote, “I agree wholeheartedly with journalism education: This is a very
complex business and journalists need to know this strange world they are
jumping into before they overwhelm themselves and drown.”
She was referring, of course, not to education on how to write or to
edit a story, but to how to do the right thing. Students here are steeped
in that, and I’m delighted to have had the chance to try to help keep at
least some of them afloat.
One other thing: I’ve learned a lot. After 33 years in newspaper work,
I thought I knew about the press. But I learned a great deal more as a
result of working on various research projects with students and colleagues.
I’ve visited newsrooms, talked to many editors and CEOs and gotten all
sorts of insights into journalism and journalism-related issues that I
would not have if I’d simply continued as a working journalist in Des Moines.
In addition to being so focused on getting the paper out that the ethical
dimension was short-changed, we were so focused on what we were doing that
little attention was paid to how journalists performed generally. Besides,
it was considered bad form to badmouth colleagues elsewhere. That’s decidedly
not true here at the journalism school. So another big difference between
working at the paper and working here is that here you sort of have a roving
commission to critique the press.
There’s a tendency in some quarters to ridicule academic research, to
see it as taking valuable time from the classroom. In my experience, it’s
time that enriches what goes on in the classroom because it makes you so
much better informed. Besides, poking into issues is what journalists enjoy
doing. And I’m grateful for all the enjoyment I’ve had both in and out
of the classroom.
Cranberg, the George H. Gallup Professor at the University of Iowa,
will retire at the end of the academic year.
