In fairness this isn't limited just to Iowa, but it's still true. A massive portion of "sports journalism" is just buddy-buddy stuff with coaching staffs. Leaking or making things sound bad means being cut off completely with no recourse.100%, and this goes back to my post the other day where these guys are nothing but just fans with press passes and they're afraid to lose their front row access because they feel like they're apart of it. In their minds, being a fan blogger>being a journalist. Hell, the only reason why Hlas was able to stick around for so long, despite being the only one there who was remotely objective, was because Ferentz actually liked him.
It's not really a "journalism" field in that regard. There's no system in place to enforce integrity or unbiases views around it, since the people controlling it are the ones on the teams. No system exists to protect the people who would speak about the bad things (as opposed to other journalistic fields out there).