By Victor Greto
NEWARK — Ralph Begleiter can’t figure out who he is.
Standing in a blue suit, hands in his pockets, he looks with wistful pride at a map of the world hanging on the wall inside his cramped second-floor office in Pierson Hall at the University of Delaware.
The map at which the Rosenberg Professor of Communication and Distinguished Journalist in Residence fondly gazes is stuck with dozens of pins, in just a few of the 91 countries where he’s traveled, regions ranging from the Middle East to Russia to Europe and North and South America.
“You see this?” he said, nodding at the map with his large head, topped by a thick shock of white hair. But he just as quickly pulls his right hand out of his pocket and waves it at the map dismissively.
That’s the past.
Although his compass of concern is larger than the perimeter of his office, it’s in this room, and on campus, and in the short few miles he drives from home to work that has become much of his working life.
The 55-year-old former CNN world news reporter is already in his fifth year of teaching broadcast journalism to UD students, most of whom were born after he began his career with CNN, only a year after the all-news cable network began in 1981. Many of his students are too young to remember his reporting as the Berlin Wall fell, during the first Gulf War, or even during the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s.
More importantly, because of their youth, many of his students aren’t quite sure what journalism is about, he said. That’s real journalism he’s talking about, not the shout-fests and opinionated news hours currently broadcast on the all-news cable channels, including his former employer.
“I have had a hard time telling people that there are jobs in journalism unrelated to opinion,” he said.
Which may be part of why he’s having trouble realizing who he has become, or is becoming: a seasoned teacher whose receding past has quickly turned into a part of another era in journalism.
“I have trouble defining myself,” Begleiter said later, after guiding students through a newscast on a set CNN donated to the school, which he had used in his former career for a talk show about global affairs.
That donation is symbolic, of course. CNN has no current show like it. Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Americans seem no more informed about world events than before, Begleiter said.
“Am I still a journalist? Not really,” he said. “I’m not trained as a college professor. So what am I?”
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According to both students and colleagues, he is a veteran reporter whose love of international politics and journalism has meshed expertly with a laid-back teaching style. And his contacts throughout the world have brought international newsmakers to the school in a reinvigorated “Global Agenda” speaker series on international issues.
But he’s also an investigative journalist, a job whose nature, almost by definition, makes some people angry.
The latest proof is the recent lawsuit he filed against the U.S. Department of Defense and the Air Force. Along with the National Security Archive, a non-profit research institute within George Washington University, Begleiter filed the Freedom of Information Act suit in early October in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. He has requested copies of military photographs and video of the honor guard arrival and transfer ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base for those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The lawsuit was filed after months of FOIA requests Begleiter mailed to follow up on the pictures posted on the Internet Web site www.thememoryhole.org, headed by Russ Kick, who obtained 361 photos of remains taken by base photographers through his own FOIA request.
Since the Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon has banned the news media from taking photographs of remains returned to the United States. Officials have said the policy protects family and friends of the dead.
Although the Department of Defense has responded to each of Begleiter’s FOIA requests, the letters have been non-commital.
Pentagon officials have called the release of the images to Kick’s site a mistake and said that no other requests for photos of remains would be granted. That’s what bothers Begleiter so much.
“I said it was crazy for them to call it a mistake,” Begleiter said. “Someone made a conscious decision to do it. Now it’s a mistake. We need a consistent policy.”
According to photographers at the base, nothing is photographed until an officer requests it, and no photographs have been taken of remains since March 2003, said Lt. Caroline Lorimer, a Dover Air Force Base spokeswoman. She would not comment on whether this has become a policy since the previous photographs became public.
Begleiter also is using the lawsuit for his teaching, as an example of what investigative journalists can do.
“Here’s a great case study of media management by the government,” said Tom Blanton, director at the National Security Archive.
“There’s an issue here on what is the appropriate respect accorded to remains,” he said. There is no consensus opinion. “This is the kind of debate an open society should have,” he said. “My instinct is when government is covering something up, we should ask questions about it.”
But there are other concerns as well, especially for families of soldiers.
Kathi Lichtenstein of Claymont, whose son Karl spent more than a year in Iraq with the 249th Engineer Detachment of the Delaware National Guard, said that it doesn’t matter whether the flag-draped boxes of remains are anonymous. “Everybody is somebody’s son, and it’s disrespectful,” she said.
She agrees partly with the Department of Defense’s reasoning behind the ban, but also agrees that the images show the price of war.
“But there’s so much of it on TV now, about death, that anyone with half a brain knows what’s going on,” she said. “We owe them proper respect: Get permission of the families and do it in a dignified manner and not for someone’s political agenda.”
Begleiter denies he has a political agenda, since the ban also was in place during the Clinton administration.
He also is suing for the images to assist his student, Kelly Gast, 20, who is working on project about the power of war imagery in history.
“Images are a significant factor in how people decide whether they support a conflict,” Gast said. “I’m finding that people’s lives are the biggest cost people associate with conflicts, and that images register more of an emotional toll than words.”
If and when he gets the images, Begleiter said he will give them to Gast and to the National Security Archive, which probably will post them on the Internet.
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Beglieter retired from CNN, in part, because of the changes he saw occurring in broadcast journalism. He also wanted to be at home more with his wife, to whom he’s been married for 32 years. He chose the University of Delaware because, while living in Washington D.C., they bought a summer house in Rehoboth Beach.
He also wanted to be close to his aging parents. When he first took the UD position in 1999, his parents lived in New Jersey. They have since moved to Wilmington. And turning 50 was a time to re-evaluate his life. Which he’s still doing.
Although Begleiter may doubt his identity, others do not.
He’s very self-conscious about not having a Ph.D., said Joseph Pika, who is teaching a class this semester with Begleiter on the Presidency.
“But he brings an enthusiasm and freshness and doing things that are non-traditional in the classroom, from arranging speakers to arranging field trips,” he said.
Harris Ross, an English professor who teaches print journalism, said Begleiter’s influence has been two-fold.
“Ralph has brought high-profile people here that our students would never have had a chance to hear,” he said. “The issues that are aired here are vital.”
Ross said Begleiter’s three decades of broadcast journalism experience have brought a new dimension to the school. Although Begleiter’s academic appointment straddles the English, Communications and Political Science departments, he has effectively created a space for broadcast journalism.
“As far as the shift to broadcast journalism, it’s going to come, no matter’s who’s doing it,” Ross said. There is always a tension between journalists who work for newspaper and those who work for television, he said. Even so, “Because of Ralph’s background, he’s able to do it in a way that is unarguably academic.”
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According to students, there are waiting lists for his classes.
Kelly Kennedy, 21, a senior, said she took Begleiter’s Broadcast Journalism class this semester because students recommended it. “I was actually unsure whether I could get the class because a lot of people wanted to be in it,” she said. There’s only 11 students in the class, she said.
Last week, Kennedy produced the half-hour news broadcast the class creates each week. Not surprisingly, while it focused on the election, it took an international slant. Each week, students swap roles, from anchors to producers to editors to interviewers to reporters.
As a teacher, Begleiter has a light touch. He allows the organized chaos of the broadcast to play itself out until students ask for help. And they do. A lot.
During the broadcast, the students made many mistakes and overcame numerous technical glitches. Throughout the broadcast, Begleiter scribbles notes.
“In this class, it’s not about individual students,” he said. “If you do your job and someone else screws up, it’s a flop. It’s about the power and value of collaboration.”
After the broadcast, Begleiter gathered the students and does a “post mortem,” mostly about what was good, peppered lightly with criticism.
Begleiter said he sees himself at UD for some time to come, expanding broadcast journalism’s role in the university and in the state.
If Begleiter’s vision of himself is divided, his focus has become concentrated on the university and the state. “I’m at the end of my career,” he said. “In a state like Delaware, I can make a small difference in the quality of public affairs to students and the broader community.”