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.”
Despite the rigorous process a journalist goes through before they publish their stories, the average person might be unaware of how much work is actually required. To complicate matters, many people get their “news” from less than reliable sources. Consumers of news often times do not necessarily question the veracity of what they are reading.
“In some cases, readers treat what they read the same way if it’s coming from the New York Times compared to, say, some random website on the internet. They’re given the same weight.”
This leads to messages being consumed based on what readers want to hear, rather than what the source is. Nowadays, there is such a vast array of sources of information, that digging through it all to confirm what is true and what is not can take up a lot of an individual’s time.
“I also think that the internet and social media phenomenon has shortened our attention span. We like stuff to happen quickly. I remember reading a study that tracked how long people would watch a video for before their attention began to wane. It’s about a minute.”
Between people’s shortening attention span and an overabundance of misinformation, it is becoming harder and harder to deliver reliable information. Now, not only do reporters have to synthesize important information into a digestible length (such as a new, lengthy bill introduced in Congress), but they have to do it at an even more reduced length than in years past. And that has its own set of issues.
“If you’re trying to do this complex story, with a lot of details, but it has to be done in a minute or people will quit watching… then what’s getting left out?”
These are issues that current journalism students will need to be prepared to face in their approaching careers. Cribbs remarked on how much more straightforward the field was back when he was a student, but the industry has since quickly expanded in its complexity. It makes it difficult to predict exactly what issues students will face, but he tries to prepare them for anything.
“We have a class in law and ethics. We try to arm them with a sense of what their roadmap is going to be.” Cribbs wants his students to be able to navigate any situation they may face that might test their sense of right and wrong.
Ultimately, it’s all about the message: “if you can't communicate well, then the message is lost, and that's one thing we do focus on a lot. So yes you have the story and, you know, you have a good ethical compass, and you've collected all this information, but if it isn't communicated in a way that gets people's attention, and is meaningful to them, then you've lost the message.”
“Just don’t do anything you can’t defend.”
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