Dan Berkowitz (UI SJMC Professor, 1988-2018, Member SJMC Hall of Fame) 

By Al Berkay

Professor Dan Berkowitz, Ph.D. held a 30-year career on the faculty of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication…but it was a career that almost didn’t happen. 

In high school, Berkowitz enjoyed spending time in the band room and the photography lab. His passion for these activities was so strong that he didn’t have the grades necessary for college, let alone graduate school. In fact, a high school guidance counselor suggested he try pursuing a two-year degree at a liberal arts school. 

However, a move from one Southern California suburb to another during his senior year of high school inspired a more substantial interest in academics. Berkowitz also began to enjoy backpacking in the Sierra mountains and even camping in the snow. After two years of general education courses, he transferred from California State University-Fullerton to Humboldt State University, another California State University located in the coastal redwoods, 800 miles away from home. He thought he would pursue a career in forestry and started working toward that degree.

After completing his bachelor’s degree in forestry, Berkowitz worked for a year as a research assistant for the U.S. Forest Service, a summer with the California Division of Forestry in the redwoods of central California, and another summer marking ponderosa pine trees for sales with the U.S. Forest Service. But none of that experience felt like a good fit. 

Berkowitz took the STRONG test, which compares a person’s personality traits with others in a broad range of career paths. In that test, a score of 100 would suggest that the test taker would strongly relate to people in a specific field; a score of 0 would essentially suggest the test taker would have difficulty saying “hello” to those people. Berkowitz scored a 1 on the test for a category called “Forest Service Man.” Not believing that his test score was correct, Berkowitz took the test again, and his score indeed changed…to 0. 

He suspected that this signified something and Berkowitz started examining other options.

Earlier, Berkowitz had written for The Lumberjack, the student newspaper at Humboldt State University, and was a photographer for the Daily Titan, the Cal State-Fullerton student newspaper. He also took a few journalism classes at Humboldt after finishing his forestry degree, but he didn’t actually finish a journalism bachelor’s degree. 

Berkowitz also was a disc jockey at the Humboldt State University radio station for a few years. So, he gave commercial radio a try, playing records and telling the time and temperature at a nearby AM station. But after meeting a 30-something DJ named Ted Marvelle who drove a Plymouth Valiant held together with coat hanger wire, he decided that radio was a fun job, but not much of a career. 

Life was offering a big hint, but once again, Berkowitz almost didn’t take it.

After his two-year radio “career” ended - at the peak of the disco era - he decided to try making a living in writing and PR. He cut off his “Jewfro hairdo,” put away the striped hippie overalls, bought a pair of polyester Angel’s Flight pants and vest, a dress shirt, a necktie, and a nice pair of shoes. 

A job interview soon surfaced and Berkowitz headed from Northern California to Oregon for a position as writer-editor-photographer-ad salesman-circulation manager and whatever else…and became the director of communication for Associated Oregon Loggers and editor of The Log, its appropriately-named magazine. While Berkowitz later took on the same kind of position at a community hospital, getting closer to a long-term career, he wasn’t quite there yet.

After 8 years of various communication-related jobs and armed with a portfolio full of magazine articles, brochures, news releases, photographs and audition tapes, it was time for Berkowitz to find out what he should have known before he began doing all that work. As it turned out, he never went back to the professional world of journalism and public relations. 

He became a professor of journalism instead.

The University of Oregon was nearby, so in 1983 he applied to graduate school in journalism and began his academic career. Berkowitz soon found that he was much happier in a university setting than he had ever been with previous jobs.

Berkowitz’s research interests grew out of a summer internship experience in media relations at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). One hot summer day, a news story broke about the DEQ and its field burning smoke management program where Berkowitz interned. The initial story blew things out of proportion and later was picked up by the Associated Press, spreading around the state of Oregon. 

Later that day, two TV reporters showed up in the DEQ office. They had been told on their car phone that there was a story to cover but they weren’t sure of the specifics. Berkowitz tried to explain that the initial story got it wrong and that he was the source for the story. They said, “No, the AP wire is right.”

That incident with the TV reporters was the driving influence for much of Berkowitz’s early research, raising two basic questions: What is news?” and “How come it turns out like it does?” This led to his dissertation topic and several studies about local TV news and the relationship between journalists and news sources.

Wrapping up his master’s degree at Oregon in 1985, Berkowitz spoke with some of his mentors about where to do his PhD. He whittled it down to three…and the University of Iowa (UI) was one of them. But the advice he got was “Iowa is a good place to go if you already know what you want to do.” Eschewing uncertainty, Berkowitz ironically turned down admission to UI and began to plan his move to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He took the frugal way of checking out Bloomington, renting a VHS player and a copy of the movie “Breaking Away,” which took place in and around there. He watched the movie twice, just to be sure.

Berkowitz faced a challenge in finding an academic advisor at IU. His first advisor accepted a new job the day he asked him to consider serving long-term in that role. A second advisor agreed to take on the task but changed his mind a week later…too busy, he said. Finally, his third try at finding an advisor - David Pritchard - was successful, and with him Berkowitz began learning the fine art of graduate student advising, and the importance of collaborating with students. In all, Pritchard advised or co-advised more than 20 doctoral students. With the addition of students in master’s programs, Pritchard served as advisor for more than 50 IU graduates.

Fast-forward three years to 1988, and Berkowitz was on his way to Iowa City for a job interview at the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC). It felt like a premonition that he was heading to Iowa City because, early in his master’s program, Jessie, his officemate, wore an old-school Herky sweatshirt to class one day. When asked about the odd-looking bird, she explained that she was from Iowa City. Having grown up on the West Coast, Berkowitz had trouble locating Iowa on a map, let alone Iowa City.

Fast-forward a bit more, but not a lot, because Berkowitz was one of the rare individuals to finish both a master’s and Ph.D. in five years (thanks, in part, to being awarded a dissertation fellowship). He accepted a job, met the actors from “Zadar, Cow From Hell” outside of what was then the Holiday Inn, found a house to rent, attended one Lamaze class, and, poof, Berkowitz also became a new father after living in Iowa City for only two weeks.

At SJMC, Berkowitz taught Public Relations, Sociology of News, Computer-Assisted Reporting, and Research Methods, among others. During his final three years at UI, he taught Media & Terrorism and served as director of graduate studies. He also advised the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) for at least a dozen years and served as faculty adviser for The Journal of Communication Inquiry. He additionally held an eight-year stint as associate dean in UI’s Graduate College.

For research publications, Berkowitz set a goal of 50 “things,” as one graduate student called them…journal articles, book chapters, and edited books…which he exceeded. His research grew from a basic examination of journalism – often quantitative and based in the social sciences to more of a qualitative approach that was more culturally grounded. By the time Berkowitz reached tenure as an associate professor, he began to believe that research should not only be rigorous and conceptually grounded but also interesting. Hopefully, the five article abstracts below are demonstrative.  

Suicide Bombers as Women Warriors: Making News Through Mythical Archetypes (Berkowitz, 2005). Mythical archetypes often become a journalistic tool for reporting news about terrorism. This study of female Palestinian suicide bombers suggests how mythical archetypes changed initially from the male suicide bomber as Trickster, to female bomber as Woman Warrior, and finally, to the Terrible Mother - when the circumstances of a seventh suicide bomber no longer fit a Woman Warrior mold. The study suggests that journalists negotiate their reporting within two realms: realities of occurrences and resonance of myths-to accomplish their work.

Constructing a ‘First’ First Lady Through Memory: The Case of China’s Peng Liyuan (Ling & Berkowitz, 2017). This study analyzes how the cultural memory of previous and contemporary First Ladies was used as a journalistic device by US media to make sense of the unusual case of Peng Liyuan, then the First Lady of China. A textual analysis suggests that news coverage of Peng relied on a Western and gendered conception of the First Lady, while distancing her from her predecessors. Resonance with an idealized First Lady template served to signal Peng’s progressiveness in both the general and the political sense. Although Peng’s performance as a ‘first’ First Lady was celebrated in international politics, cultural values and gender norms associated with the First Lady identity can become rhetorical tools that sustain the existing political order between the West and the non-West.

Media Errors and the ‘Nutty Professor’: Riding the Journalistic Boundaries of the Sandy Hook Shootings (Berkowitz & Liu, 2016). This study explores the relationship between social media and threats to journalism’s authority during coverage of the mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Two related threats are examined. One concerns widespread errors in the early reporting of the shootings. A second threat came shortly after, in the aftermath of a communication professor’s blog claiming a conspiracy between media and government. The study considers the concepts of paradigm repair, boundary work, what-a-story news, and memory in the renegotiation of journalistic authority.

Miley, CNN and The Onion: When Fake News Becomes Realer than Real (Berkowitz & Schwartz, 2016). Following a twerk-heavy performance by Miley Cyrus on the Video Music Awards program, CNN featured the story on the top of its website. The Onion - a fake-news organization - then ran a satirical column purporting to be by CNN's Web editor explaining this decision. Through textual analysis, this article suggests how a Fifth Estate comprised of bloggers, columnists, and fake news organizations works to relocate mainstream journalism back to within its professional boundaries. 

Drawing Lines in the Journalistic Sand: Jon Stewart, Edward R. Murrow and Memory of News Gone By (Berkowitz & Gutsche, 2012). In mid-December 2010, The Daily Show fake news host Jon Stewart asked Congress to address the healthcare needs of 9/11 rescue workers - which it did. Shortly after, the New York Times published an analysis comparing Stewart to the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. This article explores how the collective memory of Murrow was used by both mainstream media and the blogosphere to negotiate the membership boundaries of journalism itself.

One of Berkowitz’s greatest joys was working with graduate students on research, especially with international graduate students. In all, about 20 of his publications were collaborative efforts with grad students. Over the years, he served as adviser or co-advisor for at least 60 grad students across SJMC’s two master’s and doctoral programs. He also served on so many dissertation committees that he stopped counting. 

Berkowitz’s interaction with graduate students fostered trips to international conferences and other opportunities, including Thailand, Israel, South Korea, Egypt, Germany, England, Sweden and…Jamaica. Notably, the latter started in February, far removed from the winter in Iowa.

One of Berkowitz’s most meaningful career moments was receiving the Graduate College’s Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. He also worked in a split appointment between SJMC and UI’s Graduate College. During that time, Berkowitz served as interim director of the Iowa Press and interim department chair of the Library School. For a while, his two-sided business card showed three simultaneous positions: Professor, Associate Dean, and Interim Director of the School of Library & Information Science.

Overall, Berkowitz’s research experienced significant change during his 30-year career. While he began “studying media,” based on social science and quantitative methodologies, he developed a more cultural vantage point that drew mainly on qualitative approaches. Along with these broad shifts, his contextualization of “media” shifted significantly as well. And as a former budding forester, the latter helped him better see the media forest through its metaphorical trees.

References

Berkowitz, D. (2005). Suicide Bombers as Women Warriors: Making News Through Mythical Archetypes. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 82(3), 607-622.

Berkowitz, D. & Liu, Z. (2016) Media Errors and the ‘Nutty Professor’: Riding the Journalistic Boundaries of the Sandy Hook Shootings. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 17(2), 155-172.

Berkowitz, D. & Schwartz, D. (2016). Miley, CNN and The Onion: When Fake News Becomes Realer than Real. Journalism Practice, 10(1) 1-17.

Berkowitz, D. & Gutsche, R.  (2012). Drawing Lines in the Journalistic Sand: Jon Stewart, Edward R. Murrow and Memory of News Gone By. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 89: 643-656.

Ling., Q. & Berkowitz, D. (2017) Constructing a ‘First’ First Lady Through Memory: The Case of China’s Peng Liyuan. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 19(9-10), 1239-1256.