The Beer Can Sign That Delineates Iowa’s Divide

Carson King held up a sign at the Iowa-Iowa State Football game asking for beer money, and like seismic forces beneath the earth’s crust pushing tectonic plate against plate, a Des Moines Register story suddenly caused a major media quake.

The fault line was already there. It’s easy to blame President Trump and his nasty “fake news” rhetoric, but his message resonates for some of Iowans. And on the King story, Iowa has gone beyond crazy.

Image downloaded from KCRG.com, credited there to KCCI. Carson and his sign.

The Des Moines Register, in the wake of King’s beer sign and online fund-raising drawing oodles of money for the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital, reported on some racist tweets King wrote as a teen. To his credit, King didn’t shy away from the truth, admitted he had sent tweets he now considered shameful, and apologized.

But there is a growing anti-journalism cultural strain that has been building up energy for years. The King saga, for some reason, unleashed an unholy upheaval that threatens to level the media landscape in its wake.

Well, good, some would say. Those nasty liberal Des Moines Register libtards are getting what they deserve. Who needs a newspaper—indeed who reads a newspaper—anyway?

I don’t think it was coincidental that Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds quickly joined team King. Republicans in the state, even before the fake-news-in-chief became president, have been divorcing themselves from traditional media coverage—refusing newspaper invitations to speak with editorial boards, not returning candidate questionnaires, never acknowledging that there is any legitimate or important role for traditional news media.

Image by Rod Boshart of the Gazette, King and Reynolds.

And after the economic recession of 2008, newspapers have been in a constant state of turmoil and retrenching. One can hope that the internet will allow more growth of viable alternatives for news, but sadly, the economic model of the online world heavily favors the giant corporations running the show and not the ink-jet-printer-stained wretches producing the content.

Anyway, the King story took on a wild life of its own. In its wake, for reasons that honestly make little sense to me, the entire staff of RAGBRAI resigned and have started an alternative Iowa Ride. Yes, I know, the Register would not let the director of RAGBRAI speak freely—but that’s not an unusual action for a corporation, media or not, in the midst of a crisis.

Why was the King story the trigger for this quake? I think it has something to do with a certain disdain for modern times that defines a kind of building cultural backlash. Iowans used to be known for being literate, well-educated and tolerant. That was then—maybe the 1970s or so. Now, we’ve underfunded our public schools for decades, trashed higher education and become more suspicious of newcomers and outsiders. In too many cities and towns, among too many white Iowans, casual racism is common and expected to be excused, especially if it comes from the young.

And we, good white Iowans, don’t like them darn liberals shaking their nanny state fingers at us and telling us we have to tolerate Mexicans and blacks and homos and all those others who don’t, by God, respect the imagined glory of rural America.

I think Gazette columnist Lyz Lenz says it well in a column posted this week entitled “We are missing the point.” She writes:

 “It’s telling how many white Iowans have mumbled to themselves about their own social media history, as if it was somehow a rite of passage to be occasionally racist in your past. It’s not, actually. Nor should it be. But we tell on ourselves with what we fear: We don’t fear racism, we fear being discovered for it. We fear the reporter asking about our misdeeds more than we fear actually doing them.”

The other thread of this odd saga is that people want their heroes unstained by reality. They want Carson King cheered, and nobody to look too closely or ask too many questions. This, for instance, is verbatim a comment on the RAGBRAI web site following the latest bicycle ride blow to the Register:

“Hey Des Moines Register, don’t bother trying to have your ride this year. Anyone can see how badly you’ve handled this situation and every move you make digs your hole deeper. There is no recovering from this disaster. After 11 RAGBRAI’s, I’ll be proudly supporting Iowa’s Ride and the people who stood up to your liberal censorship. To recap, your actions so far have been to drag a young man’s name through the mud (all while he was donating $3 million to a children’s hospital), drop a bomb into what was, arguably the feel good story of 2019, ruin the reputation and career of a reporter doing your bidding and now, ruin the greatest cross state ride in history. I hope the idiotic editors who chose to run that crap are happy.”

Well. I doubt that they’re happy. Carson King got a day named after him, and frankly seems to have behaved far more rationally than the crowd of King minions. And I don’t know how editors, in deciding how to handle the King story, could have or should have anticipated the bomb that the RAGBRAI staff had in store.

And so it goes. I do not think the Register showed good judgement in how it handled the original story—and I am also not so proud that the reporter, who himself was guilty of iffy past posts, was separated so quickly from the paper. But the Register’s story, even if it was badly done, was factual. The response to one editorial misstep has been beyond overboard—it’s a nuclear response to a spitball.

The Register doesn’t need to be burned to the ground, nor do its editors or reporters need to be threatened.

Right now, our nation is lurching towards a Constitutional crisis. And the election of 2020, already well underway in Iowa, is shaping up to be more bitter and divisive than the rhetorical blood bath of 2016.

And we Iowans are most outraged that Iowa’s largest newspaper would dare to actually research the social media history of a suddenly prominent person.

It’s not the only sign, if additional ones were needed, of how anti-media this once savvy state has become. Take the recent case of The Carroll Times Herald, a once daily paper that is now published twice a week. Last year, that paper investigated a local police officer and found that he, a married man, was having inappropriate romantic relations with local teenage girls. The girls were not underage, so the law was not broken, but the officer involved resigned and admitted in court afterwards that the relationships, which led to vandalism committed by jealous young girlfriends, were not appropriate.

And yet, the officer sued the paper for libel. The paper won. The judge issued a 10-page ruling that basically said the paper’s original stories were true. See the Washington Post’s story. Their image, below, had this caption: Douglas Burns, the Carroll Times Herald's co-owner, pictured at a newsstand. (Provided by Douglas Burns)

Picture from the Washington Post.

The prize for journalistic accuracy? Crushing debt for a small local business that has had to set up online fund raising in an effort to stay afloat.

The price of truth telling is getting higher, these days. Unlike the Register, the Times Herald, as far as I can see, didn’t engage in iffy editorial judgements—it acted as a good local newspaper should, as the watchdog for its community, pointing out the ill deeds of a local official.

And for that, it joins the Register in being at risk.

Too many of us have allowed a cancerous anti-fact and anti-news attitude to take hold in this once proud state. The most obvious tumor is the giant orange one in the White House, but his ignorant rants about fake news are just the outward manifestation of a deeper, darker cultural trend.

Trash the newspaper. Hate the messenger. Defend the “good” white Iowans. Look to the pastoral past, not the uncertain future. Defund education. Forget controlling pollution. Quit telling us this perfect place is at risk due to climate change or racism or other large demographic and economic trends that we don’t clearly and easily understand as our education system slips to third rate, our lawmakers forgo public discussion of key laws and our newspapers, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly in a beer-fueled football induced earthquake, pass away.

I hope it’s not goodbye to sane, sensible, live-and-let-live Iowa. But I fear our knee-jerk online reactions, full of fury and feelings and fear of facts, are not signs that we are on the mend yet.

ICMA report 2: Some lessons to learn

I kind of wish I had been videotaping rather than shooting images of the Iowa College Media Association convention. Of course, I have two cameras with me, and they both shoot video, but I don’t really want to edit hours of video.

OK, what I really mean is I wish someone else shot video and edited it to a highlights reel, but then again, there were a lot of highlights from the first day of the ICMA convention.

I thought our keynote speaker was interesting. Are you ready for a mouthful? It was Amalie Nash, who since 2014 has been the executive editor and vice president for news and engagement at the “Des Moines Register.” I must be getting old, as a newsroom title, “VP of news and engagement” sounds way too new age for me.

She made many good points—many of which are not revolutionary, and echo what I’ve long told my students, but I liked the way she put things. When covering news, always ask yourself “why is this a story?” And she was spot on—one of the problems with beat journalism is the risk that the journalist becomes too much a part of the club, or, as I would paraphrase her, the writer beings writing for his or her sources rather than the readers.

Amalie Nash, "Des Moines Register" executive editor

“Know who you are writing for, who is going to read your content,” she urged. CO 120 students, take note.

She also noted that many of her college classmates didn’t end up in journalism careers because they didn’t do an internship, and thus had no professional samples. Again, as I’ve told any MMU student unfortunate enough to be cornered by me—you must write for the Times, even if you’ll never work in newspapers, because you must establish a portfolio. And there is a reason why you can’t get a journalism degree or any other communication degree from MMU without an internship.

As for breaking into the field, Nash’s wisdom isn’t new, but is relevant: Network. Get to know people. Make a name for yourself.

As a young professional (Mariah Young of Dwolla, an e-commerce company) said: “You are your own brand.” “I am a product,” she added.

Aaron Young of the "Des Moines Register"
listens to Mariah Young.

Anyway, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with all of Nash’s speech. I am a bit bit ill at ease with the need for audiences to be “personal” with their journalism sources—I don’t care what she ate at the State Fair, it doesn’t seem like “news” to me. But I don’t deny that she’s fundamentally correct that journalists have to find new ways to reach audiences as the media landscape quickly evolves. And, after all, now that I think about it, my previous blog post about ICMA awards started with what I ate, so who am I to talk?

Mariah Young, by the way, was part of what I think was the best panel of young professionals I’ve seen at ICMA.

In particular, I liked some of the things that Kyle Oppenhuizen of the Greater Des Moines Partnership said. He emphasized that he has changed jobs, and in each has found that good writing skills are the key to his work.

Two MMU students listen to young professionals panel.

“I don’t know much about business, but I know how to be a reporter,” he said.

And what is one key to good writing? “Listening is maybe the most important skill you can acquire,” Oppenhuizen said.

David Ekstrom, Meredith, and Kyle Oppenhuizen.

Amen to that.

Prior to the young pros, there was a panel on diversity. That was interesting, too, partly because Justice Gage of the BVU Tack noted how his campus had a forum on immigration.

The sound you hear is my ears pricking up. I coordinate an annual Fall Faculty Series at Mount Mercy, and our topic for 2016 hasn’t been named yet, but has to do with immigration.

“Everyone has an immigration story,” Gage said. I’m not sure that is literally true—at least one Native American is an official at MMU—but it’s a pretty good generalization. I’m the product of a Hungarian family that came over a bit more than 100 years ago—my grandparents on my father’s side were immigrants. My mother’s Irish family had been in the country longer, but was in the great wave of 19th century immigration that causes so much fear and anxiety in the 1800s.

If Donald Trump were running for president in 1855, he would want to stop all those Irish from coming over “until we can figure out what is going on.” Give it up, Don, you won’t ever figure it out.

Justice Gage, BVU, listens to Danielle Ferguson, ISU.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that we want to play with the way the people of the USA understand their own immigrant heritage and our reactions to new immigrants. So Gage’s remarks resonated with me.

I got a lot of food for thought from the first day of ICMA. For one thing, the editor of the Register asked how many students regularly do video storytelling. Although I require it to a limited extent in my journalism courses, I can’t help but feel even writers need to be pushed more to be conformable with that kind of storytelling.

You have to reach the audience where it is willing to be reached.

And I have to go to bed. Day two of ICMA will be exhausting if it’s as interesting as day one.