Professor Cribbs worked as a reporter for 25 years before coming to FGCU to teach journalism back in 2010. In his time in the field, he has seen it all. While in the last several years, the feelings of animosity towards the media as a whole seem to have taken center stage in much of the discourse around politics, Cribbs experienced it for much of his professional career.
“I used to encounter people who were angry at me. Told me to go home, you know? That I was a vulture, a scumbag. This happened long before it became kind of a national conversation.”
These types of encounters were all too common for Cribbs, whether he was reporting on a disturbance at a bar involving college students, or a car crash involving teenagers. Confrontations from those involved always sprang up, often out of the fear of misrepresenting what really happened or painting them in a bad light.
“A lot of times we are shining spotlights on people who have done things that would be considered embarrassing or humiliating to them or their family. People don’t really like that.” Other times, the story might be about the absolute worst moment of a person’s life. “I did a story once on a young boy who went missing and ultimately died. We had to go talk to the family about what happened. To their credit, they invited me in, talked about their departed son, and were just the most gracious, loving people.”
Often, journalists go into negative situations like these, and being the outsider, people’s guards are instinctively up. They are on heightened alert to the possibility that an outsider will come in and try to dig up dirt that will make their reality even worse, rather than focus on the good that a journalist can do by informing the community.
“I don’t know that that ever goes away. People are looking for that kind of stuff.”
Cribbs mentioned how in most of his confrontations, where a person approached him with hostility about his reporting of the news, the root of the problem was often a lack of understanding of the journalistic process. Cribbs recalled how many times someone would call him after one of his stories was published, and how these callers would complain that his stories were inaccurate. But each time, Cribbs would have an honest conversation with them, and explain each step he went through to gather the facts, talk to sources, check public records, etc.
“Nearly every time that I would have these one-on-one conversations with people, they would understand what I did, and by the end of the conversation they would be less hostile. I think it calms them, to just know that I did go through a process and I didn’t just throw it out there. Some people are surprised that there’s such an editorial process.”
