A native of the Quad Cities, Kris Ketz got his start in broadcast journalism there. The son of legendary newsman Jim King, Kris has an outstanding career of his own. Paul Yeager and I talked to Kris for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting Oral History Project. Here are some excerpts from that conversation. Watch the full interview here.

How did you get your start in broadcasting? I was still a senior in high school when I was hired to read weekend news at what was then WQUA radio in Moline. This would have been the summer of 1977. We had a news department that was a six person staff. My radio experience, I think, has made me a much better person to do television. I always thought if I just kept my mouth shut and watched how these people worked, I might learn something and here I am about to finish my 41st year at KMBC television in Kansas City. And I’ll be here for at least another three more.

Did being Jim King’s son help you make the jump from radio to WQAD-TV? There was no question about it. I was lucky enough to realize that I was given an advantage. Being Jim King’s son opened doors that never would have happened otherwise.

Then you made a big jump in market size, going to KMBC in Kansas City from WQAD. How did that come about? Sheer luck. The news director at the time at WQAD left and came to KMBC here in Kansas City, a guy named Pat McCarthy. And what was ironic about that time was Pat and I weren’t really speaking to each other for about the last four or five months of my time at WQAD. We had gotten kind of sideways. But Pat gets the job, comes to Kansas City and literally about a month or two later calls and says, listen, we’re changing things down here in Kansas City. I’d like to offer you a job.’

What was one of your most memorable stories at KMBC? It was a story about two families. One family had lost their mid-twenties daughter in a car crash. The second family had a mom who needed a heart transplant. And we happened to be there the first time that the heart donor’s mom met the recipient. The meeting was just incredible. I remember looking at Greg as he was recording all of this on video, and he started tearing up and I started tearing up. I remember whispering into Greg’s ear, ‘this will be a great story if I don’t screw it up.’

Broadcast journalism is a family tradition, isn’t it? Your dad, Jim King, you, and now your son Jonathan Ketz. Tell us how he’s doing. His first television station out of the University of Missouri School of Journalism was at WQAD in Moline. They actually made him an offer right after he graduated a semester early from the University of Missouri. He spent nine wonderful years there. But he always wanted to come back to Kansas City because this was home. And now he’s at Fox for our competitor across the street. He’s doing terrific work. He really is.

You anchored a couple of times at WQAD with your dad Jim King but in 1998 there was a special night at KMBC for the two of you. I remember him (the news director) calling me into his office and he said, ‘Do you think your dad would come down here and anchor a Father’s Day 10:00 newscast on a Sunday night with you?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask him.’ Sure enough, Dad said yes. That was a night I knew was going to be fun, but I had no idea how much fun it would be. It was one of the great nights in our life.

One last question, Kris. What would you hope that your legacy would be when people think of you after you’ve retired? I think I would want people to say that ‘he did it the right way, that he did it honestly, that he tried to tell all sides of a story, and that hopefully he just didn’t screw it up.’

In the Quad Cities if you say the name Jim King, most long time TV viewers will immediately know who you’re talking about even 25 years after his death.

 Jim was a news anchor and reporter at WQAD-TV for almost four decades. He was one of the station’s first employees when it went on the air in 1963, and the station’s first sports director. Jim had been working as sports director at KETV in Omaha after a career in the Air Force where he got his start with Armed Forces Radio.

“Oddly enough, the ironic part about that was that my father really didn’t know anything about sports, but he could read scores, and he could read stories,” his son Kris Ketz said in an interview for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting Oral History Project. After a year and a half as sports director at WQAD, management moved him to the news anchor position.

Watch the full interview along with funeral eulogies and a 1999 video tribute

Jim King’s real last name is Ketz, but KETV management thought Ketz was too ethnic, so they made him change it, Kris said. It was an air name that he continued to use throughout his career.

Jim covered a number of big stories, including historic Mississippi River floods in the Quad Cities in 1965 and 1993. Probably the stories he was best known for though, Kris said, were in 1966 and 1967 from the Vietnam war. He and a photographer went to Vietnam to talk to local service men and women who were involved in the war.

“That certainly couldn’t have been cheap. It wouldn’t be cheap today,” Kris said. “But the fact that a television station the size of WQAD committed to a story like that, I think really said a lot about the people who were in charge of WQAD at the time.

That second trip to Viet Nam almost ended in tragedy. Jim and a newspaper reporter from the Orlando Sentinel got a “little bit too close to a Viet Cong mortar that hit just right outside Da Nang where there was an enormous US military presence,” Kris said. Jim was hurt and stayed in a hospital for a month.

“I’ll never forget that moment in the living room at the house that I grew up in, in Moline, when the day we got a call and just how close my dad came to becoming a casualty,” Kris said.

In 1983, Jim made a similar trip to Beirut, Lebanon after two suicide bombers detonated truck bombs at the U.S. Marine barracks killing 241 American servicemen. WQAD photographer Lane Michaelsen accompanied Jim to interview surviving soldiers from the Quad Cities area.

Jim’s Viet Nam experience came in handy. “We had to bribe our way past Customs, but it didn’t phase Kinger at all,” Michaelsen said. (Jim was affectionately known as Kinger by news staffers.)

Another time during their 10-day trip, the two covered the kidnapping of another American reporter. “The network wanted our video because somehow Kinger got us into places they had never been,” Michaelsen said.

Muscular Dystrophy Telethon host
Besides his reporting and anchoring, Jim was well known for his work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). He raised thousands of dollars for MDA over the years hosting the local portion of the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon.

Hosting the telethon was the most visible part of Jim’s work with MDA, but it was just part of an ongoing effort. During the year Jim reported stories about children with Muscular Dystrophy that ran in newscasts. He also spent time at the MDA camp each summer.

Kris said it was more than just an assignment for Jim. “He got close to these people and told those stories and really thought that we needed to do something about this. And we needed to help find  a cure. So his devotion to this particular effort was, my goodness, second to none.”

Whether it was the telethon, his anchoring, or his reporting, there was one thing Kris said that set his dad apart from many other journalists. “He was just so authentic. He was genuine. There was nothing ever fake about what he did and how he did it. And that’s not something that you can develop. It’s either there or it’s not.”

Jim King received many awards during his career. He is a Gold Circle member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences Midwest region. It’s the highest honor given to a broadcast journalist by the Academy. He was inducted posthumously in 2009.

Special thanks to Paul Yeager, Randy Schumacher, and Kay Grigsby for assistance with this project.

A gift from his parents is what led Gary Dolphin to become Iowa’s best known sports radio broadcaster. Dolphin says listening to sports play-by-play on a transistor radio as a kid piqued his interest.

Dolphin has been “The voice of the Hawkeyes” doing radio broadcasts of the University of Iowa football and men’s basketball teams since 1996.

Paul Yeager of Iowa PBS and I interviewed Dolphin for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting. Here are a few highlights of our conversation. You can watch the entire interview here.

How did you get interested in broadcasting? I remember when I was, I think eight years old, it would have been in the late ’50s, my parents giving me a little red plastic spin dial RCA transistor radio. I found it fascinating that I could lay in bed at night and just twist that dial an eighth of an inch. And there’s Ernie Harwell in Detroit doing the Tiger games, the legendary Hall of Fame, Voice of the Tigers. And then I could twist it a little bit more, and Jack Buck and St. Louis on KMOX. And then a little bit more and I get Merle Harmon doing the twins on WCCO in Minneapolis. So I fell in love with baseball at a really early age, and I thought to myself, wouldn’t that be fun to do?

What’s that relationship like for you with the Iowa players? You’re part of the family, but you’re also still the guy who has to be objective on the air. How do you walk that line with Coach Ferentz or any coach? I said to both Coach Fry and to Coach Ferentz, if we’re playing like doggy-do-do, the listener or the viewers are going to know it. I said, where are the boundary lines? How critical, how critiquing can we get? And Hayden and Kirk almost said the same thing. ‘If we’re playing badly, go ahead and tell your audience. But don’t get personal,’ and we would never single out a kid by name.

The audience may not know it, but you’re not working alone during the broadcast are you? I understand the value of your analyst, of your producer, your engineer, your spotter. We have four or five people in the booth on Saturday afternoon. It’s not just me and Eddie (Podolak) or me and Pat Anger. And those guys bust their buns to put a good product on the air. And you know, we’ve got paper flying all around, plugging our sponsors, and I’ve got a great staff to keep me on the straight and narrow.

What is it that you’re trying to do as a broadcaster during those games? There’s the old line, try to paint a picture. And so I’ve always taken that into the broadcast booth. Be your very level best. Be prepared. Give your heart and soul for the next 12 weeks, with a couple of bye weeks sprinkled in, and people are going to enjoy listening to you. And don’t make it all about the game, I talk about the events of the day as well.

How long are you going to keep working? I just turned 73 and I’ve got three grandkids. And it’s not that I have other priorities that supersede Iowa football and basketball. But you know, it’s physically (demanding), particularly basketball, where you’ve got 30 some games, and half of them are road trips, and most of them are in the middle of the night in January and February. That’s going to take a little bit of a toll mentally and physically on me, but I still love doing it. I see myself doing this, health permitting, for at least two or three more years. And you know, when I get to 75 that’s probably going to be enough. We’ll see where we’re at, at that crossroads.

What will be the lead sentence in your biography? It would probably be along the lines of small-town Iowa kid, farming community, kid makes good in the broadcast booth. You know, that’s pretty corny. But after all, corn is our number one product here in Iowa, with all due respect to pork farmers.

In addition to calling games, Dolphin is the host of the weekly radio program “Hawk Talk” where fans can call in to talk to Dolphin and Iowa coaches Kirk Ferentz and Fran McCaffrey. He also hosts weekly television coaches shows, where Ferentz and McCaffery recap the latest games.

Dolphin was named “Iowa Sportscaster of the Year” by the National Sportscasters and sportswriters Association  in 2000 and 2010.

Andrea Zinga is a familiar face to Quad Cities TV news viewers. She worked at all three Quad Cities network affiliates as well as CNN. Later she twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress and is now retired.

Paul Yeager of Iowa PBS and I talked with Zinga about her career for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting’s Oral History Project.

Here are some edited excerpts from our conversation. You can watch the entire interview here.

You’ve said the biggest story you covered during your career was the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1994. You were working at CNN. Tell us about that. I was on the overnight shift anchoring. I was on a break, I was on the phone, and all of a sudden, the beeper at my waist went off. Centennial Olympic Park was across the street from the CNN towers, so we knew the whole area and everything about it very well, thank goodness, because something had exploded. So for two hours, we just sat there and ad-libbed. So I was able to just say the basics of what we knew and then go to people live. And then eventually we got interviews from people who had seen the guy. (Zinga and her CNN colleagues received a national Emmy for their coverage.)

Let’s back up now. Your first TV job was at WQAD in the Quad Cities. I had been in radio, and finally got my interview with the general manager (at WQAD), and he said, ‘What do you want to do here?’ I said, ‘Well, I want to give the news.’ And he said, ‘Nobody wants to hear a woman give the news.’ So I started as a file clerk, and then I started to write commercials, and then I started to voice commercials. And I would sit there in my off time and look at the “On the Air Sign” on the wall, and I would read to it, and that’s how I was able eventually to get into reporting at WQAD.

You worked your way up to co-anchoring with Jim King at WQAD, the legendary Quad Cities newsman. Do you have any anecdotes about working with him? One day on the air, we had just read a story about Marilyn Monroe’s underwear being auctioned for a certain amount, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars. And Jim, being Jim, turned to me absolutely deadpan and said, ‘What would you take for your underwear?’ Now he could not have got away with that comment today, right? I mean, he would have been immediately hauled into the office, if not worse.

What’s a story that stands out for you when you worked in the Quad Cities? I did one when cholesterol was sort of a new thing that people had not heard much about. We did this series on cholesterol that was at KWQC, and we sent 11,000 people to the hospital to have their cholesterol checked. And I’m sure we saved some lives. So that was pretty cool.

What are your thoughts on the future of so-called legacy media: newspapers and TV news?
People are going to get their news where it’s the most convenient. I think local (TV) news probably is going to be safe for a while, especially with the demise of local newspapers, because if people want to know what’s happening locally, they have to look at the local news. But as far as in the future, it will be whatever is the most convenient source.

Speaking of the future, what does the future hold for you? I’m being asked to write a book on becoming a TV anchor, and I don’t know who wants to read it, but it’s fun to write. I’m still waiting to make my mark on the world in a way that will be remembered. So I’m still working at that.

That was going to be my next question. What do you want your legacy to be? How do you want people to remember you? What I would hope is people would say, well, she was fair and she was mostly kind, and she was funny sometimes, and she was a good person.

Larry Wentz has been a broadcast journalist for nearly 50 years, working at stations in Iowa and Wisconsin. He arrived in Sioux City in 1991 and has anchored at all three Sioux City TV stations. Currently Wentz is the noon anchor at KTIV.

Wentz talked about his career during an interview for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting Oral History Project. (Watch the full interview here.)

How did you get interested in broadcast journalism? My parents listened to the radio in their shop a lot. I kind of got a love for that on our little hometown radio station. I started working there in college doing weekends and summer fill-ins, that type of thing and that kind of piqued my interest. I ended up going to Iowa State University in Ames because I thought they had a lot of broadcasting classes.

You’ve worked in Sioux City for a long time, you must like it there. I have to take it as a sign of respect. And if they didn’t like me or respect me, I think it would have turned out to be different.

It was around 2011 that you had a serious health problem and needed a liver transplant. Tell us about that.  I had what was called autoimmune hepatitis, it’s an autoimmune illness, it decides it wants to attack a portion of your body and it just happened to get my liver. I was fortunate enough that we had the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the lead transplant center, close in Omaha. I got lucky that I was able to get a liver. For a while it looked pretty, pretty tenuous there. And then I was out of commission for basically a year.

You’ve covered popes and presidents, floods and plane crashes. But tell us about a fun story you’ve done. One of them that I really had a lot of fun with was Kathleen Freeman. I don’t know if people remember her, but she was Sister Mary Stigmata on the Blues Brothers. She had come to do the Donna Reed festival in Denison, Iowa. I was going to do a live interview with her, I think on our six o’clock newscast. And she asked me before we went on “do you want me in character?” Well, yeah, of course. She put on an old kind of a floppy hat with a flower in it if I remember right, and she was just, she was just crazy. It was an awful lot of fun.

What changes in broadcast journalism have you seen during your long career?  When I first started in the business, you had a reporter who would go out with a photographer and normally the photographer would edit (the stories).  Now these young people, they don’t call them reporters anymore, they call them multimedia journalists. And that means they do about 10 things at once. They not only go out and shoot the story, but they may have to take their laptop computer with them to go an hour away from town and edit their story out there. They also take what they call a “live view” instead of having a live truck go up there or a satellite truck an hour away. They take a little unit with them where they can plug into the internet, and they can feed their story back from there as well as do a live report.

You’ve done some teaching as well. I’ve had an opportunity to teach journalism at Briar Cliff University for a little bit and also at Western Iowa Tech Community College in Sioux City. In fact, at the station I’m at right now KTIV, I’m happy to say we’ve had up to six people who are in some of my classes that are working here at the station. And that’s very rewarding.

What do you hope your legacy will be? The only legacy I hope that I leave is that people think that I was fair. I look at this not as just a job, I look at it as a calling. And that calling to me was trying to be fair and accurate.

Wentz won the 2012 Jack Shelley Award, the IBNA’s highest honor. He has also received numerous awards for his reporting and anchoring, including a regional Emmy for coverage of the 2011 flood in Sioux City.

A high school class started Steve Coon on a broadcast journalism and teaching career that took him from his Marshalltown, Iowa hometown, to Washington, D.C., and to cities all over the world.

Steve is now retired from teaching journalism at Iowa State University and lives with his wife Beth in Ames. He talked about his career during an interview for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting Oral History Project.

Below are excerpts from the interview. You can watch the entire conversation here.

How did you get interested in broadcast journalism? It started when I was in high school. I was taking a speech class and one of the things that we had an opportunity to do was once a month students in the class would go to KFJB, the hometown radio station. We had a half-hour music and talk program.

You worked at KFJB full-time for a while, then got your degrees from the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. While you were at ISU you worked at WOI radio and TV. What did you do there?  WOI radio was doing gavel to gavel coverage of the Iowa General Assembly. Phil Morgan, who was the news director for Channel 5 and WOI radio, and I would go down to Des Moines. And one of us would do play by play, if I can use that description, of the General Assembly from one chamber, and the other one of us shot video and interviews of the other chamber. It made for really, really long days because at the end of that, and as the legislative session continued to get longer toward the end of the session, we would have to drive back to Ames to process the film. We were using film rather than videotape, and then we would cut and splice. So it seemed as if we were spending almost 24 hours a day working during the legislative session, but it was, in some ways, some of the most gratifying work of my career.

Then you went to Washington D.C. and worked for the Voice of America, and you’ve got an interesting anecdote about your time there. When I was at Voice of America, we would frequently get memos from the State Department. And some of them were classified, even top secret. They were basically, information,  background, only the State Department was trying to persuade us to frame stories in a certain way. (For example) when you’re writing about the Panama Canal, write this or bear in mind this. So we would get these memos and the head of the Latin American desk when I was working there, would make sure that each one of us had read them, the memos and not necessarily the top-secret documents, but we read those too. After we had read the memos, he said, ‘OK, (has) everyone read this?’ And we said yes. Then he would crumble it up and throw it into the wastebasket, and we would go back to what we were supposed to be doing. Top secret memos! Too often I said, ‘why in the world is this top secret, there’s nothing in here that’s going to damage national security.’ I think someone must have run out of ink on the lower classification stamp and just said at the end of the day, ‘I’m tired. I want to get out of here. Let’s just stamp this as top secret.’

You taught at the University of Nebraska, and then made the move to Iowa State University in 1981 where you taught with the legendary Jack Shelley, the long time WHO news director who had become a professor at ISU. What was that like? He was just a great person to work with, great personality, wonderful broadcast journalist, and we who worked with him, we’re always going to be students whether we were teaching in our class with him, or sitting in the classroom with him. Final anecdote about that. My mother always considered Jack Shelley to be her broadcast hero. When he was working for WHO you could get the signal in the broadcast transmissions from WHO all over Iowa. When we were living in Mediapolis, we would listen to Jack Shelley when I was growing up. And so the year that I worked with Jack Shelley made my mother so happy that she said ‘you have reached the peak of your career. You’re working with Jack Shelley’ and I think she was right.

Another interesting and unusual part of your career was that you worked internationally to train foreign journalists. Tell us about that. I received a Fulbright scholarship in 1984 to go to Ecuador. I had an opportunity to do some teaching, and it was evening classes at a university there. That eventually led to invitations from the Voice of America’s International and Media Training Center, and then from the State Department to do short term training. I did end up going to every single continent. It was thoroughly enjoyable, extremely gratifying. (Many of the journalists) are working under terrible circumstances. By that, I mean, oppressive governments.

What do you think about the current state of journalism? I think the major problems are really at the network or national level. I think local journalists, especially here in Iowa, continue to do a good job. But they are under pressure to do increasingly more with less resources. When you have fewer staff and you have more newscasts, and you have more stories to report, it just becomes increasingly more difficult to do the kind of quality work that the public deserves. One of the expectations, which I don’t like I’ll be absolutely honest about, is that reporters are expected to blog, to post opinions on social media. I think that is a bad idea. I don’t want to know what a particular journalist feels about a particular issue. But when he or she is expected to then go and do a blog, and post observations on social media, I think you run the risk of revealing an ideological bias that in my opinion, damages your reputation and subsequently hurts the reputation of the organization that you work for. I think that’s one of the challenges.

What would you like your legacy as a teacher and a journalist to be? I just want people to think that Steve Coon was a nice person. I had a workshop with him. I was in class with him, and he taught me some things that really helped me in my career. And in my life. I’m a better person because I knew him. It’s as simple as that.

Steve continues to do reporting and video work. On his YouTube channel you can watch his commentaries, legislative coverage, political coverage, opinion pieces, sight and sound videos, and a documentary: “Clearing the Static: Herbert Hoover and the Radio Act of 1929.” He is also a past executive president of the IBNA.

He was “just a baby,” John David said, when he began his broadcasting career at 16 years old, working as a volunteer at an NPR radio station in his native Los Angles area.

Later, while working on his master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University, David spent time in Washington, D.C. as a stringer for a Peoria TV station.

Following graduation, he took a full-time job at KWQC-TV in the Quad Cities in 1984 doing a mix of reporting, weather, and anchoring. In 1989 David moved to WQAD-TV in the Quad Cities, retiring in 2018.

As part of the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting Oral History Project, Paul Yeager and I talked to John David about his more than 40-year career. Here are some excerpts. (You can watch the full interview here.)

What were some of the big stories you covered in the Quad Cities? I know you remember the mid ’80s. It was an interesting and difficult time around here. The farm crisis was going full bore. There were also a lot of problems with the industry associated with that. So you had plants like the Farmall plant closing down. in Rock Island, you had the Caterpillar plant in Davenport closing down. And then there were the stories on the farms themselves. It was just tragic that these farms had been in families for over 100 years. And people couldn’t make it financially and then they were having to auction everything off.

While you were at WQAD you did some traveling to cover big stories. One of those involved Galesburg, Illinois. They had a Maytag plant at the time that had been flourishing. I believe at one time they had more than 2,000 employees. They (Maytag) pulled the plug and said, ‘We’re closing the whole thing down.’ And that was a big crisis for this area, because not only did a lot of the people that worked there lose their jobs, but they had these ancillary businesses that supplied parts and provided services to Maytag that were no longer needed.

We thought this was a pretty important story. So believe it or not even a station with our resources sent photographer Doug Froelich and me down to Reynosa Mexico with a crew from Knox College, a couple of professors who had studied this. We shot what turned out to be an hour-long documentary on it. And that was a really fascinating experience. That ran in February of 2005.

I remember WQAD also sent you to Canada to cover a major issue affecting not only the Quad Cities, but the entire country. We went to Windsor, Ontario, to compare the health care systems of the universal health care in Canada with what we were grappling with in the states. That involved hospital visits and looking at businesses and companies and how they provided insurance. We compared that with the situation here. And that was also an hour-long thing. I felt really lucky to get to do these things because there aren’t a lot of local stations that will invest that kind of time and money into going out that far out to do this.

Speaking of health, in 2017 you had two heart attacks, one while you were on the plane on your way to a vacation in Los Angeles. Tell us about that. In the middle of the flight, I thought ‘I’m really not doing great.’ As soon as we landed, I said, ‘I’ve got to go get this checked out.’ So my wife drove me to the nearest hospital. I had almost a total blockage of what they call the widow making artery so I wouldn’t have lasted much longer. They took me in right away and put in a stent, which I was incredibly fortunate that we had the foresight to go to the hospital.

They let me out of the hospital, and I came back to the Quad Cities to recuperate. I went to a doctor’s appointment here and I had a heart attack in the examining room, another one. The cardiologists here put in two more stents. I’ve been fine since, I take a lot of medication, still. I’m really grateful I was able to bounce back.

There were a lot of technological changes during your career. What were a few of those? We had in 1988 (at KWQC while co-anchoring the 5 p.m. magazine show) one of the first satellite experiences where we rented a satellite truck for a couple of weeks and took the show out to various communities and did the show remotely almost every night during that whole May book.

I started in the three-quarter inch videotape era with the big decks, those TK cameras, the heavy units that you carried around. We used manual typewriters; they didn’t even have electric typewriters when I started. No cell phones, no internet. So if you were out on a story, you had to find a payphone.

What do you think is going to happen to journalism in the future? It’s frightening, isn’t it? Especially when you look at the environments we’ve experienced. Even since I retired, the last six years or so. There’s the rise of anti-media journalism. When I started, (journalism) was considered a noble profession. But there was the rise of this vitriolic talk radio that started out in the ’80s, the Rush Limbaugh stuff that was kind of the roots of this. And then it gradually led to these Fox News performers, and the negative imagery out of Washington. It makes it harder to try to seek the truth, and do a good job as a journalist, but at the same time, it makes it even more important to do that job.

One last question, what do you hope your legacy will be? I hope that I’ve in some way, been able to carry all the lessons that they (previous mentors) were so willing to give to me, and pass those on to others, the next generation. We need more people to get into journalism. There are fewer people these days that want to do this. So it’s important for those of us that have done it and are doing it to reach out and communicate that energy and enthusiasm to others. I think that’ll make this business a better place to be.

Former NBC and ABC investigative reporter Brian Ross says his stories often make officials and politicians not only uncomfortable, but angry.

Ross attended a celebration at Wartburg College of what would have been Grant Price’s 100^th birthday. Price was a long time Iowa broadcast journalist and later a Wartburg College professor. He also founded the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting (AIB).

Ross got his broadcasting start at KCHA radio in Charles City, Iowa. He later got his degree from the University of Iowa journalism school and his first TV job at KWWL in Waterloo.

Paul Yeager of Iowa PBS interviewed Ross in front of the audience attending the event. Below are excerpts from the interview. You can watch the entire interview on the AIB website.

Does a journalist of today, 2023, need to have some type of formal training to get into the role to be respected?  I think you might need a degree to get hired and sometimes the master’s degree helps you even get hired quicker. But I think what you need to do is to be able to think, have intellectual curiosity, and a key is to be able to write. And that’s the one thing, I think the one trade or craft where college and high school can help the most.

You said strong editors helped you and have helped you in your career. Why? Because you need strong editors to make sure you get it right. And if you get too close to something, you don’t see your own errors and you can improve.

You describe your career or style of journalism as aggressive. Why? I’m out to get the truth. And too often I run up against government officials who try to spin it, don’t want the truth to be known. And, you know, I include corporate officials. I include people on both sides of the aisle in terms of politics. That’s really our job, to figure it out, what’s really going on, and to explain it in a way that connects with the viewer, the reader, the listener.

We are in 2023, and just a couple of years ago, I remember former President Trump on stage in front of thousands of people pointing out where journalists were standing and saying, ‘they are the enemy.’ How did you react? I took it as a challenge. And I would also say that the shift in reporting techniques that was required by the Trump administration was a good thing for journalism. We had often been too cozy and too tight with government officials. And this reminded us, I think, in a way that we need to challenge presidents and mayors and governors, senators. I think it was healthy for journalism to have a Trump administration which required us to get back to our basics of doing the job.

You’ve been in hot water a time or two.  I’ve made mistakes. I’ve always thought you’re going to make mistakes and if you make a mistake, you correct it. Take the consequences. You know, I’ve been sued probably 12 times, never lost one of the lawsuits. I prevailed or settled. I’ve angered lots of people.

How has the internet affected journalism? I think it’s changed everything in a way. It’s easier in some ways to do our job. Technologically its improved it substantially. There’s more reach and almost anybody can be a journalist now, you know, we aren’t licensed. Talking with students here yesterday at Wartburg we  talked about the need for media literacy. How do you figure out what to watch or what to read?

Could you remind us of a couple of the stories that you have done that you felt were most rewarding? We did an investigation into Walmart. We learned Walmart was using child labor in Bangladesh to make t-shirts and other clothes, which were being sold in their stores under a ‘Made in America banner.’ We went to Bangladesh. And at some of the factories there had been fires where a number of children were killed because they locked the doors for fear they would be stealing t-shirts. I then went to Bentonville, Arkansas to confront the new president of Walmart, David Glass. Sam Walton had just died.

When I handed him a picture of the bodies of the dead children outside his factory in Bangladesh, you could just see the look in his eyes. He got up, walked out of the interview, went to the phone…and called Jack Welch who was the chairman, president of General Electric which at the time owned NBC. And he told Jack Welch, ‘if that story airs, every single GE product comes off the shelves of Walmart.’ So this was a challenge for journalism. And to the everlasting credit of Jack Welch, they decided the story would air. And they said, ‘you’re going to go back and continue the interview.’

 I went back to interview David Glass, and this second interview was even worse because I asked him about these young children working in the factory. And he said something to the extent of ‘well, you know, with those little brown people, they look a little younger than they actually are.’ This was on camera, three cameras rolling.

So when this aired it was a crisis for Walmart. That was a story that had great impact and I was proud to do that. And I was proud of the bosses who withstood the pressure. By the way, the GE products did not come off the shelves. It was an empty threat.

Ross joined the Law & Crime Network in 2018 as Chief Investigative Correspondent, after decades of award-winning work in similar positions at ABC News and NBC News.

Among his more than 75 major awards are 19 Emmys, six DuPont awards from Columbia University, six George Polk awards, five Peabody awards and in 2016, the Harvard University Goldsmith Award for the year’s outstanding investigative report in either print or broadcast. 

He may have been retired for 10 years from sports broadcasting, but Don Sharp still watches lots of sports on TV and in person. Just ask his wife, he says.

Sharp had a more than 40 year career in radio and TV, most of it at WHBF in Rock Island, Illinois, where he was sports director (except for a stint in the ‘90’s as the station’s main news anchor).

Here are excerpts of an interview Paul Yeager of Iowa PBS, and Cliff Brockman, a retired Wartburg College journalism professor, conducted with Sharp for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting.

(You can watch the full interview here.)

How did you get into radio? I am originally from Dundee and a friend told me about a broadcasting school because I was really interested in sports and broadcasting. So I went to broadcasting school in Chicago, it was about a three-month deal.

What was your first job? I grabbed a U- Haul, my wife, and our new baby, and pulled a trailer down to Stephenville, Texas, which is about 30 miles or so from Fort Worth. To say it was a small radio station would be putting it mildly. We were out in the middle of a field. Cows came to the window every so often and things like that. But six months was enough of that. We came back to Freeport, Illinois. And I spent a couple of years in Freeport in radio.

Then you went to Aberdeen, South Dakota for about a year and a half. That was kind of neat, because they had minor league baseball. When they went out of town, we did the broadcast when the bus driver would call back after three innings and say, ‘Here’s a single for Wallace, the double, a double play.’ And then we had to make up the game like it was going on. People thought we were actually going to the games. The bus driver a couple of times, one in particular, couldn’t get to a phone and call back. So I’m sitting there having to stall until we finally hear from the bus driver. I mean, I had bases being knocked loose. I had big scrambles for foul balls in the stands because I had to really stretch it out.

Then you came back to Illinois, to WHBF radio and TV in Rock Island. What did you enjoy most about your time there? Doing play by play of football and basketball because it was so big at that time. We’d have a full house in the gym with 5,000-6,000 people and they were filled up whether it was Moline, Rock Island or East Moline.

Any memorable moments from that time? Don Nelson was from Rock Island, played at the University of Iowa, and then was one of the Boston Celtics. He got together with Rock Island’s coach at the time, Bob Riley. And they brought the Boston Celtics to town for an exhibition game before the season. They played Cincinnati. Afterwards, they all got together at what is the Sheraton Hotel and that was one of the neatest experiences I’ve ever had. Bill Russell and a couple of the Joneses, and Jerry Lucas who was playing for Cincinnati, were all sitting around. I don’t think I said hardly a word and listened to their stories.

You’re in retirement now. Do you watch play by play or watch sports for the play by play? Are you done with sports? I watch a lot of sports, just ask my wife. I like watching and listening to the announcers, and it’s fun to compare a lot of them.

Don Sharp received the Illinois Broadcasters Association Broadcast Pioneer Award in 2017. He was named to the Mid-American Emmy Association’s Silver Circle in 2019.

Iowa broadcast journalist Rick Fredericksen is the 2023 recipient of the Jack Shelley Award, the Iowa Broadcast News Association’s highest honor. Fredericksen’s nearly
50-year career took him from Des Moines to Vietnam, Hawaii, a return to southeast Asia, and finally back to central Iowa.

A native of Des Moines, he enlisted in the Marines in 1967 during the Vietnam war. After Boot Camp, the Marines sent Fredericksen to broadcasting school even though he never thought about journalism or broadcasting as a career. “So rather than pick up a rifle, I picked up a microphone,” Fredericksen quipped during an oral history interview for the Archives of Iowa Broadcasting.

Then for a year he was a reporter and program host for the Marine Corps Air Stations Radio and TV Section in North Carolina. Highlights included providing updates to commercial radio stations during a hurricane and covering a missile exercise in Puerto Rico.

At age 19, the Marines sent him to Saigon, South Vietnam where he was a TV and radio newscaster and war news editor with the Armed Forces Vietnam Network (AVFN). He covered military briefings and news in the field. Fredericksen said a highlight was being the lead reporter for President Nixon’s visit with combat soldiers.

While at AVFN he was involved in a controversy when he was one of seven broadcasters who were disciplined for protesting military censorship of some of AVFN’s. “When I look back now, I don’t think it was as serious as we made it out to be. I think the military has a right to restrict some news. After all, we were broadcasting in the war zone,” he said.

Coming home to Iowa
After finishing his stint with the Marines, Fredericksen returned to Iowa and landed his first job in commercial broadcasting at KRNT radio in Des Moines. After a short time he moved to TV and became a reporter at KRNT-TV (now KCCI-TV) in Des Moines.

Fredericksen worked his way into anchoring at KCCI, eventually co-anchoring at 6 pm with Paul Rhoades and at 10 p.m. with Russ Van Dyke. (Rhoades and Van Dyke were long-time KCCI news anchors, and both are previous Shelley Award winners). Here’s a newscast Rick anchored in 1976.

He spent 12 years in Des Moines then took a job at the CBS affiliate in Honolulu, Hawaii. Fredericksen’s brother lived there, and on a visit to see him Fredercksen took along a few resume tapes and interviewed for a job. Growing up in Iowa came in handy, he said, when he had to cover a blizzard in Hawaii! He had driven to the top of a volcano to cover an event when the storm hit. He ended up staying overnight during the blizzard and got altitude sickness before returning home.

Going to work for CBS
After three years in Hawaii Fredericksen was on the move again, this time to Bangkok, Thailand where he worked for CBS Radio and TV as the network’s Bangkok bureau chief. His stories were aired on all CBS news programs including the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather,” “ 60 minutes,” “48 Hours,” and “Sunday Morning with Charles Kurault.” Vietnam was still a big story as the country recovered from the war and he went their 20 times to cover stories. Here is a story he reported for CBS.  

While in Bangkok Fredericksen also started his own independent news agency and provided coverage to the Associated Press, various magazines, the BBC, public radio, and many other outlets.

Home again
Fredericksen worked for 10 years in Bangkok, then as CBS began closing its overseas bureaus he took a job as news director of WOI radio in Ames in 1995. He also served as the Iowa host and newscaster for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” While at WOI Fredericksen opened the station’s first full-time Des Moines bureau.

In 2004, the Iowa Board of Regents merged the public radio stations at the three state universities  (WOI, WSUI, and KUNI) into Iowa Public Radio. He became IPR’s arts and culture reporter. During that time he launched “Iowa Archives,” a seven-year project to, as he put it, “discover historical Iowa voice and sound recordings.” He then packaged them as expanded features and one-hour programs for IPR. He retired from IPR in 2016.
Listen to Rick’s feature about restoring Trolley cars.

Keeping busy
During his retirement, Fredericksen writes articles for Vietnam Magazine and is active in the veterans community.

Fredericksen is the author of three books. “Broadcasters: Untold Chaos” is about his time as a Marine in Vietnam. “After the Hanoi Hilton: An Accounting” examines what happened to 2,500 veterans left behind in the Vietnam war. And, “Lusitania Diary” tells the story of Fredericksen’s grandfather’s emigration from Denmark to the United States more than 100 years ago. “His latest book is “Hot Mics and TV Lights” which commemorates the American Forces Vietnam Network.

Fredericksen is the winner of a Peabody Award for coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China, and he has won several IBNA awards for his IPR reporting.

KCCI’s Eric Hanson produced a story about Fredericksen’s career when Rick retired in 2016.