Doctor, My Eyes
A conversation with Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize winning Iowa journalist who has done all that he could to see the evil and the good.
By Michael Judge
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise
To leave them open for so long?
— Jackson Browne
IOWA CITY, Iowa — I first met Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of Art Cullen’s Notebook, at a funeral for a friend’s father back in 2017. The father, Jim Benson—just like his son Lucas—was a kind man from Marathon, Iowa. Jim was a farmer, savvy businessman, and, in Art’s words “the smartest man I ever met.” Art gave the eulogy. Iris DeMent sang “Amazing Grace.” You couldn’t ask for a better sendoff. That Catholic church in Waukee, Iowa, was full of love and loss and, most of all, understanding.
I mention this now because Jim’s funeral, it seems to me, represents the best of what life (and death) here in Iowa has to offer—a community that may not always agree with you, but damn sure will hear you out. As we all know, that’s fading fast. We often begin our conversations with political talking points, enthusiastically keeping score each time we take down our opponents.
What good journalism does is the opposite: It holds up a mirror so we can see ourselves—however bruised and broken—and maybe offer a hand to others just as broken as us. It also holds the powerful to account, without fear or favor.
That is the kind of journalism Art Cullen and his brother John at The Storm Lake Times have been practicing—with an entrepreneurial spirit and pioneering grit—for 35 years now. That’s not easy to do in the best of times, let alone the worst. There’s an old joke that Iowa’s biggest export is its young people. And that may be true, for many of the reasons Art has written about: high pollution and cancer rates combined with fewer opportunities for meaningful work.
But as Bruce Springsteen said of Jackson Browne, Art keeps on “creating love out of the broken pieces we’ve been given.” I sure as hell am no Bruce Springsteen, and I’m pretty sure Art—an old Deadhead—ain’t the biggest Jackson Browne fan, but the analogy works. To me, Art isn’t only an Iowa treasure, he’s a bona fide newspaper rock star. Who else could pound out pitch-perfect truths like those found in this passage from his 2018 book Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper:
Worlds are built and worlds are buried amid the tall grass here in Iowa. You plunge your finger into the soft black soil and expose a seed, a kernel of knowing where you are, a story, an idea, a myth of who you are, and it grows out here against all the odds. It persists against the hail that comes sideways. It preserves itself frozen in a January gale out of the northwest that makes you wonder how you ever survived. It gets flooded and scorched and comes back. No matter what you do for the next ten years, it comes back. It demands you pay heed to it, heel to it, nurture it, and hope for it. It’s the land, the story, an impulse to take a rough first draft of history, a drive to divine some truth in a place that lays it bare, by asking and listening. To love a place and be its chronicler, to commit yourself to it, to prick its conscience and make it aware that we have bucked up against limits, and to leave your mark for posterity. The seed becomes a song, its verses written in this expansive green garden, and you are left to discern them and write one anew. To be a friend to the place and not to spoil it.
I spoke to Art earlier this week by phone from his office in Storm Lake, Iowa. At 58, I had just tested positive for Covid, and Art, at 67, was preparing for heart surgery. Temperatures had plunged below zero closing schools across the state. It seemed to me at least—I can’t speak for Art—a fitting backdrop for two print dinosaurs to swap old stories and share our hopes for journalism’s future.
MJ: Hey, Art, it’s Michael Judge. How are you?
AC: Hanging in there.
I know how you feel. I just tested positive for Covid.
Oh, shit.
And so it’s like, I feel great, and then I feel totally exhausted.
Sure.
First off, I just want to say thanks for doing this. I’ve been reading your stuff forever.
Oh, well, thanks.
Like you, I’m an old Iowa boy. My first job was delivering The Des Moines Register in Mason City, Iowa.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I worked at the Globe Gazette in Mason City for a year and a half of purgatory.
Yeah. Well, we moved there in ’77, the coldest winter in a century, from California, and I wanted to return to California, but never got back. But right now, I’m sorry to hear you’re going in for an operation on your heart.
Well, yeah. I’m going to have one or more stents put into my abdominal aorta. I have an aneurysm, so the stents will firm up the aneurysm so it won’t blow, presumably. And so that’s supposed to take place on Wed., Feb. 19. And so I’m sitting here shitting little green apples until then.
Well, I had a pulmonary embolism last spring, a year ago in April.
What’s that?
That’s when a blood clot travels from your leg up and goes through your heart and then lodges in your lungs. And it feels like there’s a dump truck parked on your chest. But I live literally 10 minutes from the University of Iowa Hospital here in Iowa City, and they are incredible. I mean, I tell you, if I had been out on a country road, I would’ve been a goner.
Yeah. Rural healthcare really sucks. I mean, Storm Lake is in the middle of nowhere—the closest medical complex is in Sioux City, and all my experiences there have been bad. I’m also diagnosed and being treated for prostate cancer. And the more you get into this stuff, whether it’s heart or cancer or whatever, you realize how little is available to you in rural areas. The long and short of it is that there are real deficiencies in rural healthcare, both in access and quality equipment, technology, and expertise, and it’s been a real eye opener for me.
You know we met once before, briefly, at Jim Benson’s funeral.
Oh, Jim Benson!
I’m good friends with his son, Lucas.
Luke. OK. Well, Jim was one of a kind.
Back in 2017, I went to his funeral and you gave a eulogy.
Right.
It was beautiful.
Well, thanks. Yeah. I walk into the church and there’s Iris Dement playing “Amazing Grace.” I went, wow. What a man. Jim was the smartest person I ever knew.
That’s what you said in the eulogy. He was also a kind man.
Very.
Which is a combination you don’t come by that often these days.
And he was a very stubborn, conservative independent, but he was so damn smart he could change his mind. And that’s an ability that very few of us have. How’s Luke doing? I haven’t talked to him in a long time. Probably all bound up and raising his kid, I suppose.
He’s doing great. I just had a drink with him recently.
Tell him hi for me.
I definitely will. I know he has great respect for you.
That goes both ways.
I’ll let him know. So in 2017, you won a Pulitzer Prize for, as you say in your book, “taking on corporate agriculture over river pollution” in Iowa.
Well, yeah. I won the Pulitzer in 2017 for Editorial Writing, and it was about agricultural pollution of surface water, basically revolving around the Des Moines Water Works lawsuit against Buena Vista, Calhoun, and Sac Counties. And the suit was defended with dark money that we eventually reported was coming from the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, Cargill, Koch Enterprises and Bayer, or Monsanto at that time—the same old suspects, and they were trying to keep it secret and all that. So that’s kind of what it revolved around. And then what we were arguing for was mediation between agriculture and the environment—but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive—and to force some sort of a mediation between the counties and the Des Moines Water Works. And of course, we were just pissing in the wind. Well, at least we got a Pulitzer out of the deal. Even if Iowa water is filthier than ever.
So what you’re saying is even though you brought a lot of attention to the problem, nobody gave a damn.
Yeah. Particularly the Iowa Supreme Court and a federal district court judge who dismissed the Des Moines Water Works case. So it really never got a hearing. So the problem persists. In fact, it’s getting worse.
As a longtime editorial writer, I envy your writing style. It’s a hard-hitting take-no-prisoners style, laced with humor and satire. But it really separates itself by being painstakingly reported and naming names. I mean, in a lot of editorial writing, people will call out different industries and government agencies, etc. But you have a knack for going straight for the person behind the curtain.
Well, thanks.
I love it. I think of it as one part Hunter S. Thompson and one part Bob Woodward, with a dash of “Iowa Boy” Chuck Offenburger to take the edge off.
There you go! Bob Woodward. Starched shorts, right? [Laughter].
Right.
And I probably abused as many chemicals as Hunter S. Thompson, which is why I’m heading to Iowa City on Wednesday for heart surgery. Probably my bad habits caught up to me finally.
Well, I think that might’ve had something to do with my pulmonary embolism, too. But a lot of writers are plagued by what I like to call our “sedentary lifestyle.”
I’m engaged in it right now! [Laughter] The sedentary lifestyle!
But anyway, I’ve been an opinion writer or columnist, they used to call it, my whole career. Largely because I could never fully separate my life from the story. Thus TFP, The First Person. My J-School professor at Columbia told me “poets make terrible journalists,” and for the most part, he was right.
I don’t know, it seems to me that if you start with poetry, that’s the core of lean writing, and that’s what journalism is all about. You could make an argument that William Butler Yeats was basically a journalist covering the Irish Revolution.
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
A terrible beauty is born.
I wish I had said that to him, but I was scared to death of the guy. His name was David Krajicek, a big, barrel-chested crime reporter for The Daily News.
Oh, one of those guys.
Yeah.
I know who they are.
He was actually a great teacher. But anyway, I quit The Wall Street Journal in 2005, and I came back to Iowa.
Oh, what were you doing at the Journal?
Well, after writing editorials in Hong Kong for The Asian Wall Street Journal in the late 1990s, I was in New York writing for the Opinion and Leisure & Arts pages and editing a lot of op-eds and commentary. Many times I didn’t agree with the stuff I was editing. Other times I did.
Did you know Dorothy Rabinowitz? I always thought she was brilliant. Hell of a writer for sure.
Yeah. I knew Dorothy when I was there.
I wouldn’t dare edit her copy.
I did. I had to edit her copy on many occasions.
Jesus. You couldn’t improve it, could you?
Well, I tried, and she told me when I hadn’t.
I used to submit columns to The New York Times and Washington Post, and The Guardian, and I was getting published. But finally I quit because they would just chop the shit out of everything and rewrite, take something from the middle and put it in the lead. And I am big on really short leads, and they would make ’em longer. I said, this is just fucking too much editing. I go through three editors and I’m going, you’re just fucking with my stuff too much. And I see that Paul Krugman, who’s no great writer, quit for the same reason. But he could use a little editing. What really bugged me is they would take the cornpone out of everything you say. I’d try to mix in a little Chuck Offenburger and it was like radar—they’d see it and snuff it out, and especially The Washington Post, so I just fucking quit.
Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the Times and the Post, they put in those seven-clause leads.
Yeah, it’s terrible. Go back and read Russell Baker again!
Yeah. He’s…
Dead. [Laughter]
Right! [Laughter] Well, your writing is a joy because you don’t allow that to happen. You remember that old story about the editor and the reporter who crashed in the desert, right?
Not really.
The reporter has a map and a compass and everything and the editor’s got shit. Nothing. And they make their way a hundred miles in the heat. And finally, they arrive at an oasis, and the reporter’s like, OK, here’s the watering hole, and let’s go drink from it. And then the editor runs up there and says, wait, wait, wait. And he unzips his pants and start pissing in the fucking oasis. And the reporter’s like, “What are you doing?” And the editor says, “I’m trying to make it taste better.”
[Laughter] Well, that’s how I felt. [More laughter] Oh my God! So I said, what the hell? I’ll just stick to Substack. Nobody fucks with me there.
Well, that’s what I did.
Yeah. Michael Judge could probably improve my columns, but I’ve gotten to the age where it just hurts too much.
I don’t think so. No. I felt the same way when I wrote things. I wrote quite a bit. And what I liked about it is I had pretty much free reign because as an editor they didn’t mess with my stuff much.
At the Journal?
Yeah. And I could choose whatever I really wanted to write about. So I strategically wrote about things that didn’t say that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were gods that had created the earth. And then in 2005, after 9/11, I left New York. I got a job at a Gannett newspaper here in Iowa City. I quit everything. I left the old office in Lower Manhattan in the summer of 2005, long before Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal in 2007.
Oh, you left when the Bancroft family still owned the Journal?
Yes, exactly.
I used to subscribe then. Yeah, It was a great paper.
Yeah. So I left in 2005. Murdoch took over in 2007. And it has gotten more partisan on the editorial side, more predictably Republican, with a capital R, less thoughtful.
And more ideological, I’m sure.
Well, it’s a different kind of ideology. It’s not a true conservatism. Not really. Like you talked about Luke’s dad as an independent conservative thinker, that’s what it used to be, in a way.
Thanks to Bob Bartley.
Yeah, right. I used to edit his “Thinking Things Over” column.
Oh, really? Wow! There you go. God, you had two of the great ones. Dorothy Rabinowitz and Bob Bartley.
Yeah.
And Paul Gigot. He was a great columnist. And then they made him the editorial page editor. And I think he sucks in that regard. But he really wrote a great political column.
Right, “Potomac Watch.” Well, I went with Bob Bartley back to our offices right after 9/11—we got bombed out of the World Financial Center—and Bob and I went with backpacks, just the two of us with security, to retrieve his belongings from his office overlooking the Hudson River. Just me and Bartley looking through the wreckage. It was insane. I was young, and he asked if anybody could help him carry stuff. And I said, sure, I’d love to. And we were both Iowans.
Where was he from? I think he went to Iowa State.
That’s right. He’s from Ames.
He was from Ames.
Yeah, he died in 2003. My dad and he went to high school together. But my uncle, this sounds crazy, my Uncle Sam, was in the same grade as Bob.
Ames High.
Yeah, Ames High. Anyway, Bartley and I are standing there looking through this bombed-out window. I mean, it was right across from the World Trade Center, and it was just devastation, absolute devastation. And Bob just said, let’s get out of here, Mike. And he grabbed my arm and we took his framed Pulitzer, I think, and David Levine’s illustration of him for the The New York Review of Books, and some other belongings from a list made by all our staff, including a few pairs of beloved shoes for a young woman in the books department I’m still in touch with, April Powell.
Probably very dangerous to be there, but maybe that’s why you had your lung embolism.
Oh, shit. I never thought about that. I still have a lamp that I had on my desk that was torn up from the towers falling. But anyway, so yeah, it’s been a long ride. It’s crazy when you think about it, but when I came to Iowa, I thought I was going to work for this small-town Iowa newspaper. I love Iowa City. And as the editorial page editor, I thought I’d have a great deal of freedom, even in unsigned editorials. I was really good at unsigned editorials. I wrote for the Journal in Asia, and all we did was attack authoritarians and stand up for the good stuff like you know, democracy, freedom of the press. And then I get to a Gannett paper, the Press-Citizen in Iowa City, and it’s all writing by committee with everybody—including the publisher and community members and ad folks—voting on what editorials can and can’t be written.
Oh, no.
Oh, yes.
That was back in 2005, and both the publisher and the editor weren’t even from Iowa. So they went ape shit. I was writing hard-hitting stuff, and I refused to stop. And I had had pretty much free reign at the Journal, at least on my byline pieces. So I quit after five weeks.
Well, that’s enough. That’s a lifetime at Gannett.
Yeah. My poor wife. I dragged her from New York and we moved to Iowa, and five weeks later I showed up at the front door with a box full of my belongings.
Where is she from?
Tokyo. We met in Japan.
Oh, geez. Yeah. That would be culture shock, moving to Iowa. And then you come home and you’ve quit your job.
So then I started freelancing, and that was a whole other kettle of fish, but I figured out a way to pay the bills and everything seemed to work out. And then I got rehired by the Journal to do more editing for them from here, which was very nice of them. And so I did a lot of editing for them until 2017. Then I had a stint with The Dallas Morning News, again writing editorials and editing opinion pieces. To their credit, they gave me a great deal of freedom, and we saw eye to eye on most of the issues of the day. But to me Substack was a godsend—was and still is. I started TFP in February 2022. It felt like something I’d been waiting for all my life.
Yeah. Well, it’s been good for me so far. It’s been good for the newspaper, really. Because we’ve gotten about 45-grand in revenue a year, annual revenue out of Substack—that’s a reporter’s salary.
That’s incredible.
So it’s helping keep the paper alive.
And how did you do it before that?
Well, ad revenue has just been tanking. We used to have a full-page ad from the Ford dealer and a full-page ad from the Chevy dealer. Well, the Ford dealer’s gone, and the Chevy dealer doesn’t run a full page anymore. And the grocery stopped advertising. During the pandemic we nearly went broke and nearly went under. If it weren’t for the Paycheck Protection Program, we would’ve gone broke. And then we really had to make the hard pivot to trying to attract reader revenue. And it’s one thing to do that at The New York Times where you’ve got this limitless audience, but in Northwest Iowa it’s tough to survive on reader revenue alone. But that’s what we’re going to have to do because the ad revenue just isn’t there.
Yeah. I guess I have two questions. One is when I came back in 2005 and I thought I could make a difference and write editorials from my heart, and that got shot to hell by Gannett, I soon realized that “shareholder value” that maximizes profits in the short term at the expense of employees is what’s fucked over America—number one on the list being our newspapers. Everybody blames the Internet, but that’s just part of the equation.
Well, it wasn’t Gannett but Lee Enterprises that owned the Globe Gazette in Mason City when I worked there. And they wanted a 40% net profit. Tyson Foods is happy with a 3% to 4% profit cash flow. And newspaper owners Lee Enterprises wanted anywhere from 25% to 40% cash flows out of little towns like Mason City.
That’s a huge eyeopener. And I think it’s analogous to what happens on Main Street all throughout America. I had an idea for a book called Stop the Presses, How Shareholder Value Destroyed America’s Newspapers.
Well, me and about 10 other people would read that.
[Laughter] I know! But the second part of it is, like you've written about over and over, they scapegoat immigrants and round up Latinos because they’ve lost the battle with the shareholders. What people don’t realize is, it’s not the immigrants who have fucked over America. It’s Wall Street who’s fucked over America.
Yeah, Tyson.
Right. So it is the biggest boondoggle in the history of America that they’re scapegoating these people who came here to help raise profits and share prices.
Well, you’re in my wheelhouse.
So we’ve got the wrong culprits! And nowhere is that clearer than in journalism. Immigrants didn’t destroy journalism, “shareholder value” did. And this creates a snowball effect because without local accountability, it gets worse and worse. So it really is a royal shit storm of the highest order that’s brought us to this place in history.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, your piece the other day, Crazy Days, is terrifying, but totally accurate.
Yeah, well, here’s the deal. In Storm Lake, like just about everywhere else, Main Street has been replaced by Walmart. My dad had a hardware store on Main Street at one time back in the ’60s and had to get out. Best thing he ever did is when he sold that store and became a federal crop insurance agent, that’s a whole other story. And then they destroyed all that too. Put the hail companies in charge of crop insurance, and put the fox in charge of the chicken house.
It’s called regulatory capture.
That’s what it was. Yeah. So anyway, now Walmart is Main Street, and in most places—Mason City, for example—the publisher had the key to the door, but couldn’t make a decision without consulting human resources in Davenport first. And they referred to the Globe Gazette as a “profit center.” It wasn’t a newspaper, it was a profit center! And that’s why I left. After a year and a half, I couldn’t take it anymore. And I was the news editor there, the night editor, and also the editorial page editor. And that’s why I was writing editorials. If I didn’t, nobody would.
So how did you decide to go to Storm Lake?
Well, my brother John started the Storm Lake Times in 1990 and asked me to come back. And at first I refused. I thought he was crazy, and he was crazy. And then I just couldn’t take it anymore in that corporate bleeding. And so I finally agreed to come back to Storm Lake and help him with the newspaper. So I was the editor, he was the publisher, and we’ve been able to survive by hanging on by our fingernails. But we could have never survived in a Gannett or Lee Enterprises atmosphere, or whatever chain you want to pick, McClatchy Knight Ridder, because we simply couldn’t produce those kinds of margins. And Gardner “Mike” Cowles Jr., the former publisher of The Des Moines Register when it was great, truly great, he wanted an 8% profit net cash flow, and he said any more than that, it was going to hurt the newspaper. And the Cowles family made a fortune at 8%. But Gannett [which bought the Register in 1985], their appetite is insatiable. And now, of course, they’re losing their shorts.
What do you expect when you slaughter the entire herd and leave nothing left to continue it? It’s sickening.
Well, look what they’ve done in Iowa City and Ames.
Oh, I know.
The Ames Tribune was a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael Gartner won the Pulitzer in 1997 for Editorial Writing. Now it doesn’t even have its own editor. The same person who is the editor at the Ames Tribune is editor of the Iowa City Press-Citizen, right?
Yeah, I think so. It’s pathetic.
And I don’t care whether it’s in print or not. What I care about is do they have any live human beings in Ames? I don’t know how many people they have there, but we employ more people now at the Storm Lake Times in the newsroom than the Waterloo Courier does, which is owned by Lee.
I love when you write about putting down roots in Storm Lake. This passage from your book really struck a chord with me: To love a place and be its chronicler, to commit yourself to it, to prick its conscience and make it aware that we have bucked up against limits, and to leave your mark for posterity. … The seed becomes a song, its verses written in this expansive green garden, and you are left to discern them and write one anew. To be a friend to the place and not to spoil it. There’s your Yeats, right there! “To be a friend to the place and not to spoil it.” My God. That’s beautiful!
Well, thank you. I was ripping off Aldo Leopold. At least I knew what to read!
Well, I feel like not only are we kindred spirits, we’re both sort of Don Quixotes.
Like I say, pissing in the wind. [Laughter]
[More laughter] I guess one bright spot in all this is Substack and the amazing Julie Gammack and her Iowa Writers Collaborative, which we’ve both joined along with scores of other writers. I always said to myself I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me, but recently I was like, hell, I do need some sort of community where I’m not pissing in the wind by myself.
Oh man. Julie is tremendous.
She never…
Stops. I know.
Seeing the other writers in the IWC and how many good writers are in Iowa, and the poetry of it and the beauty of it, I feel like, wow, there is hope.
Yeah, there is. It’s just finding the right business model or whatever it is. We’re in the middle of that right now, and I hope I can live long enough to see that, to see Storm Lake through the storm, because I think it’s going to be another three to five years of sorting this out before we can figure out where publishing’s going.
Well, I can’t tell you how much I admire you and your brother and your whole family for what you’re doing.
Thanks. I appreciate that.
And you’re a beacon for a lot of people, not just in Iowa, but all across the country. People care about what you guys say, and that’s an important thing.
I just wish as many people cared about us as Heather Cox Richardson! [Laughter]
I know, with over a million subscribers, she’s way ahead of us all. Well, I tell you what, after your operation I’ll buy you a drink—just one—and maybe we can both have one puff off one cigarette in celebration.
Yeah, I could just live off the nose hits. [Laughter] Thanks for calling. I enjoyed talking, dude.
Hang in there. Yeah, you made me feel better.
Same here.
Take care, brother. Adios.
TFP IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE IOWA WRITERS COLLABORATIVE
This is a fun read! Art is a rare gem. I am so glad Michael found us, and we found him.
I forwarded this to a few folks before reading it and just now discovered you said kind words about me. Thank you.
Another good author, I need to stop reading and tackle my day. Michael, I remember your family members and their advocacy. Art and his family are amazing. I stopped in Storm Lake once to sign up for the online paper. I saw the Pulitzer stashed on a crowded bookshelf. Very unassuming, exactly as they are.