Peter Gross (UI SJMC MA, 1977; Ph.D., 1984)

My first paper presentation at the Ph.D. Seminar held each Friday afternoon during my tenure as an MA and Ph.D. student (1975-1982) was a hair-raising experience. A German-accented, mildly delivered yet pregnant question from Prof. Hanno Hardt that asked “where is the theoretical basis for what you are arguing” collapsed my seven-page paper down to its title. I pictured myself, the author of that formerly brilliant paper, being reclassified as the “erstwhile UI graduate student” in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC). A few hours of post-seminar angst and foreboding was eased somewhat by a beer - OK, it could have been two or three - at the now demolished The Mill, a favorite watering hole for SJMC faculty and graduate students.

Arriving at that first Ph.D. seminar was no uneventful peregrination, nor an easy, direct from point A to point B trek. It began in 1963 when my family and I were fortunate to escape the suffocating clutches of the Socialist Republic of Romania. The country of my birth was on the verge of exiting the first stage of socialism with its ghastly tableau of arrests, executions, forced labor camps, confiscations of properties, the establishment of a one-party system, censorship, and the rest of the “benefits” it brought about. Only two years later, Romania began what the apparatchiks called “The Golden Epoch” under the tender dictatorship of the “Genius of the Carpathians,” Nicolae Ceaușescu. Common throughout the Socialist or Communist Bloc and among its Western fellow travelers, similar portrayals of socialist societies and their leaders were the communist alchemists’ attempts to turn the debilitating Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism into the propagandistic mirage of idyllic, prosperous, free, and just societies. The charade ended in 1989. In Romania, the good people of my native city, Timișoara, ignited a revolution in December and terminated socialism, a term that Karl Marx used interchangeably with communism.   

After a brief sojourn in Austria and then an extended stay in Italy, I landed in Chicago in the mid-1960s. I could speak four English words with remarkable fluency: thanks, goodbye, yes, and no. I also had native mastery of “stick’em up,” having learned this expression from the gangster and cowboy films that were frequently screened each Thursday at the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Thus, I imagined my prospective American life to be a choice between being a gangster or a cowboy. I knew tap dancing in the musicals shown from time to time at the Palazzo Margherita on via Vittorio Veneto was unquestionably not an option given my lack of rhythm. 

And so began my American journey, with unexpected, unsettling twists and turns that mimicked kayaking the whitewater of the Colorado River. I graduated high school in spring 1967, after spending almost two years in the back of classrooms, feeling as lonely as anyone unable to speak the vernacular of his/her adoptive country. I learned just enough English for Northern Illinois University to accept me as a freshman intent on becoming an architect. Little did I suspect that this immigrant, whose life was culturally and in every other way involuntarily re-oriented, an American-in-waiting (I became a U.S. citizen in 1977, the year I finished my MA), was about to be ping-ponged away from his career choice. 

By the end of my first college semester, one of my professors told me that I would never make it through my undergrad program because writing acceptable papers in English was as likely as me …well, tap dancing. He advised I “emigrate” to the Department of Journalism for a couple of semesters, improve my English language writing skills and then return to my chosen educational path. It was my fate not to return to architecture, Romania, or Rome and remain in the land of gangsters, cowboys, and tap dancers, thus becoming an accidental journalist. 

After a short honeymoon with journalism, my life was once again re-directed following a meeting with editors at the Chicago Sun-Times. Their encouraging conclusion that I could become a foreign correspondent but “only after 10-15 years,” led to the fateful decision to return to academia and pursue my scholarly interests in an array of East and Central Europe media issues. 

Finally, a self-made choice and as it turned out, a perfect one. So was choosing the UI SJMC, which at the time was the only U.S. program that had three faculty members interested in international communication topics - Ken Starck, Hanno Hardt, and Joseph Ashcroft. They were occasionally joined by a few exceptional visiting professors with related interests. 

Once on its way in 1982, my academic career had me vagabonding from Iowa to California, Oklahoma, Tennessee and, finally, back to Iowa. All the while, I taught, did research, presented papers and keynote addresses, consulted, and performed assignments for governmental and non-governmental institutions, which took me to 31 countries and a good number of American venues.          

My scholarly foci were East and Central European (excluding the USSR) media, society, politics, culture, and journalism issues. Research in these regions was restricted. That point was driven home for me in 1979 when I spent six weeks in Romania on a research trip approved by the authorities, who then politely barred access to documents, records, people, even entire buildings, making Fort Knox look like it had an open-door policy. 

Nevertheless, I was happy to be part of a tiny community of American, Canadian, and European scholars oriented to media studies in the Communist Bloc; among them a handful whose outlook tilting leftwards far enough to make the Leaning Tower of Pisa look as perfectly vertical as the Eiffel Tower. Some among those hailing from the Soviet bloc were convinced supporters of their socialist system and quite possibly reported back to their respective country’s version of the Soviet KGB, while others were non-ideological academics, covertly illusionless about the realities of media and journalism in their societies. After 1989, we were joined by several capable scholars from the defunct socialist countries, some holding academic appointments in the two regions and others who gravitated to European and American universities. 

Meanwhile, I gave lectures at several Spanish universities and made conference presentations in Taiwan, Yugoslavia, India and Cuba. My 1986 participation in a “Mass media and political communication” conference in Cuba introduced me to Castro’s version of Ceaușescu-like socialism and cult of personality, the collectivist restrictions on freedoms, and the rest of the lamentably unpalatable menu of political, social, economic and cultural projects. The invitation to participate in the second Havana conference was scotched at the airport by armed guards, Kalashnikovs pointed at me, who insisted that I did not have a visa to enter the country…the one that was stamped in my passport at the Czechoslovak embassy in Washington, D.C., which represented Cuban interests in the U.S. at the time. My article in the international edition of The Christian Science Monitor published after my first visit to Cuba was apparently insufficiently inoffensive to the comrades and may have contributed to my persona non grata status.

When the imprisoning, rusty Iron Curtain crumbled in 1989, it allowed me to point my scholarly binoculars exclusively toward Romania and its neighbors. The differently achieved transitions during that year, and their difficult, varied and unequally successful processes of detoxification from Marxism-Leninism and democracy building in subsequent years became a laboratory for testing existing theories, observing media roles and journalism in the contexts of unique transformations, and hypothesizing about what underlies the nature and functioning of media systems. 

One of the lessons learned from the ongoing post-1989 transformations is that prevailing theories addressing media, their functions, their journalism, and their effects during such societal upheavals are not fully applicable. Another is that the notion that media systems take on “the form and coloration of the social and political structure” and the economic structure that contextualizes its existence, raison d'être, and performance, provides a relatively superficial explanation (Siebert, Peterson and Schramm, 1956). Imperative is a meticulous understanding of the cultural underpinnings of each affecting structure, i.e. societal values, beliefs and attitudes, on its nature and functioning, and directly on media systems. 

As if no lessons were retained, the resurrection in many European countries, in the United States and elsewhere of right-wing and/or left-wing populism and authoritarian tendencies shelves Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” whereby liberalism and democratic capitalism becomes the ultimate form of government (Fukuyama, 2006). Relatedly, attempted and successful control and manipulation of media has increased across the globe. Discarding comprehensively fact-based, fair and balanced, and opinion-devoid journalism, and embracing a journalism of “perspective” that facilely, naturally morphs into shilling on behalf of ideologies, politicians and political parties, remains a widespread practice among media people everywhere. Testifying to this unshakeable, Machiavellian propensity is the explosion of propaganda and disinformation, i.e. the twisting and disregarding of facts and contexts, and their invention. 

These sorts of “journalistic” narratives that cross into quasi-fiction or full-blown fantasy proliferate and are institutionalized in many nations. They seduce audiences with the “storification of reality,” intensifying its potential and real ruinous outcomes for society, societal and individual freedoms, and citizen actions (Brooks, 2022). Social media and artificial intelligence expand and accelerate the dissemination of these narratives, treacherously threatening people’s already precarious ability for “living in truth.”[1]

For me, all this is a bit of déjà vu that compelled me to embrace the “need” to “retire from retirement,” as former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, from both public and professional activities.

References

Brooks, Peter (2022), Seduced by Story. The Use and Abuse of Narrative. NY: New York Review Books, p. 10.

Fukuyama, Francis (2006), The End of History and the Last Man. NY: Free Press.

Siebert, Fred S., Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm (1963), Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, p. 1.