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Fox 2’s Charlie LeDuff was the subject of news stories this week concerning a drunken brawl at the St. Patrick’s parade Sunday in Corktown that reportedly involved spitting, biting, name-calling, choking and female Detroit cops. Because LeDuff had been an award-winning reporter at the New York Times and was making a name for himself on local TV, Deadline Detroit’s Bill McGraw profiled LeDuff in a three-part series in July. That series is reprised below. WARNING: This story is very long. You must be very interested in Charlie LeDuff to finish it.
Part I: “There’s Nothing Crazy About Me
Charlie LeDuff is walking through downtown Detroit, working on a story, running into “real people,” as media executives who never leave the office call readers and viewers.
A construction worker from Taylor named Nick Danias walks up. “Is that Charlie LeDuff?” he asks.
LeDuff extends his hand.
“You’re good, man,” Danias tells him. “I like you on that Ficano shit.”
A young man rides by on a bicycle.
“You are the man, Duff, you are the man.”
An attractive young woman appears. “I wanted to meet you,” she tells LeDuff. “You’re the best. Stay on Ficano.”
“What’s your name?” LeDuff asks.
“Shana.”
“You’re beautiful,” he tells her in a tender voice.
Two meter maids in a van stop on E. Jefferson and give LeDuff thumbs-up signs. One yells, “Hey, Charlie.”
LeDuff points at her and shouts: “That’s the hardest working lady in city government right there.” The women laugh.
Tom Wait, a reporter from the competition, WXYZ-TV, is also on a story at city hall. He tells LeDuff: “My parents were in town when Ficano called you a ‘xenophobe.’ My dad thought you were amazing.”
Throwing out the rules of TV journalism
LeDuff says he is just a reporter, but since he returned to his hometown and joined Fox 2 in 2010 after two years at the Detroit News, he has crossed over into the realm of Detroit TV star. He has become a sort of 21st-Century Bill Bonds, a popular yet polarizing personality whose frenetic, news-breaking television shtick has become the source of admiration, debate and, at times, scorn.
His new local stardom is the result of many things. He has thrown out the rules of how to be a TV reporter. He does not comb his hair every day and almost never dresses up. He stares into the camera and makes funny faces. On camera he wears sun glasses and talks with a swagger, referring to the mayor as “Dave” and the county executive as “Bob.” He does not stand in front of darkened buildings for a 10:00 p.m. “live shot” to talk about an event that happened hours earlier.
He works for Fox 2, Detroit’s brashest TV news operation. He is funny. He stands up for the little guy, attacks the powerful, says what’s on his mind and talks about how what’s happening in Detroit is part of a larger story, like the restructuring of class in American society.
Viewers have no reason to know LeDuff’s origins, but he is a local boy who made good, a scrawny nose guard on the football team at Livonia Churchill High School who became a star at the New York Times. Among American journalists, LeDuff was one of the nation’s best known print reporters over the past 15 years, though he remained mostly unknown to metro Detroiters.
His career has been characterized by pushing limits, winning prizes and receiving praise but also snide criticism and a couple of questions about his ethics. A think tank at Harvard recommends students read his newspaper reporting; a reviewer of his book on the American male, "US Guys," saying he made the story too much about himself, called LeDuff “an erection in print.”
“Not enough cops, not enough ambulances. The politicians promise to make it better, BUT IT’S A LIE,” LeDuff declared as he introduced a Fox 2 story about a broken-down EMS rig during raging gunfire on New Year’s Eve
“He's one of the most original reporters to hit the airwaves in a long time,” said Tim Kiska, a journalism professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has written three books about the history of Detroit television news. “He doesn't look like a TV reporter. He doesn't sound like a TV reporter. But that's his strength. He reaches out of the screen and grabs you. He connects with viewers.”
Dave Statter, who operates a Virginia-based web site that focuses on international fire and EMS issues, noted LeDuff’s bosses let him mix reporting and opinion. “In the sameness that is often TV news around the country LeDuff stands out,” he wrote.
LeDuff has a lot of strong opinions, but he also breaks news. He knows how to find and understand government documents and how to develop sources. He has a knack for talking to regular people. He breaks small news – an EMS rig catches fire – and big news: The entire EMS system is broken, and rigs arrive late as Detroiters die waiting. He has taken on Robert Ficano, the Wayne County executive; Detroit cops fudging homicide numbers; U.S. Rep. John Conyers; the water department and Mayor Dave Bing, among many others. As a result of his stories, one Detroit Fire Department commissioner and two deputy commissioners have lost their jobs.
He broke the story on Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree’s sexting. “There’s no shame in my game,” a gleefully narcissistic McCree told LeDuff, who looked into the camera with a Cheshire Cat grin, seemingly incredulous at his good luck that day.
Using histrionics to tell the story
For a reporter, LeDuff is newsworthy himself. A prominent businesswoman sued him this year. The Metro Times questioned his most sensational story, about finding the body of a homeless man mostly submerged in ice in an abandoned building. One of those fired deputy fire commissioners slapped a microphone out of his hand. He even discovered, at age 46, that he is part African American, not a small bit of news in the nation’s biggest city with a black majority. He has a book coming out in February, “Detroit: An American Autopsy.”
LeDuff is a high-wire act whose performance is infused with histrionics – his word -- and it will be interesting to watch as he works to sustain his on-air persona for the long term. What do you do after you’ve fallen into a puddle on purpose, eaten cat food, dressed like a clown, used a toilet as a prop and jumped out of bushes wearing big cat makeup? At the Detroit News, when he did a video about an older Detroit man who sells raccoon meat, LeDuff wore a coonskin cap and drank nice wine. At least twice he has joined in prayer circles on camera with the subjects of stories he was covering.
Off the air, histrionics, or at least small moments of drama, can surface in his own life. He showed up for one St. Patrick’s Day dressed all in red, recalled Bill Gallagher, the retired Fox 2 reporter who sat next to LeDuff at work. “Charlie does like to stand out,” Gallagher said. Before he came to Detroit, LeDuff was a stay-at-home dad in Los Angeles, and one day he appeared at a mommy-and-me yoga class with his baby daughter. The women refused to let him in. He wrote about that for Men’s Vogue.
In September 2008, while at the News, LeDuff was in the Anchor Bar with a number of other journalists at the end of a major news day: Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had resigned. The papers’ front pages were on display, and the newspaper people were admiring their work.
A stranger walked up, pointed at the papers and announced: “This is some bullshit!”
LeDuff turned and said, "Hey, fuck you, man. We wrote this bullshit."
The stranger responded, "Fuck you!"
It got tense, but bystanders inserted themselves, and calm prevailed.
LeDuff can turn on the charm just as quickly. Ben Schmitt is a former Free Press reporter who one night joined LeDuff and another reporter for a drink at Cutter’s in Eastern Market.
“LeDuff was dancing with strangers next to our table within two hours,” Schmitt recalled. “It should have been awkward, in this tiny bar at 9 p.m. But he made it seem natural. Charlie was someone that I liked immediately. He is smart, gregarious and outrageous, yet down-to-earth.
“Are you a little insane and a little bit filthy, too?”
Gossip columnists and commentators in the journalism trade press found it difficult to believe that LeDuff left the New York Times and returned to his hometown in 2008 to work at the Detroit News. But he insisted a major story was unfolding in Detroit: the collapse of the American middle class in the city where it was invented.
“I just think we got sold out and we sold ourselves out,” he said recently. “We did. The unions took too much. The workers cheated the clock and the management merrily went along with it so that everyone could get paid. And then when the clock stopped it was my generation without the chair, when the music stopped. That’s what happened.
“So now what? Did we learn a lesson? Yes, we did. UAW: 14 dollars an hour and a 401k. Detroit Police: 14 an hour and 401k. Detroit News, a week’s furlough and a 10-percent pay cut. “
LeDuff grew up in Livonia but made it big in New York, where he landed his first journalism job at, of all places, the legendary Times. As a Timesman he made a name for himself writing about the powerless in a paper read by the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. He won awards, including a Pulitzer as part of a team project, appeared on “Charlie Rose” and “The Colbert Report” and fended off an accusation that he had failed to acknowledge the work of an author in a story he wrote.
Colbert, interviewing LeDuff about "US Guys," asked: "Was it hard to write, or are you a little insane and a little bit filthy, too?"
LeDuff responded: "Yeah."
His national reputation was such that in 2008, when Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard, the Washington D.C.-based neoconservative magazine, came to Detroit and later published a 10,000-word article about the city’s problems, he made LeDuff’s flamboyance, his story-telling ability and his dedication to the city a significant part of the story. “For me, Detroit has become synonymous with one man, Charlie LeDuff,” Labash wrote.
As his profile grew, LeDuff also became a target for critics.
They say he overwrites, condescends, self-dramatizes, and, especially, puts himself in his stories excessively. The gossip site Gawker flamed him regularly, calling him the “mustachioed man of the people” and writing in 2009 that “rugged personality-possessing newspaperman Charlie LeDuff can typically be found roaming Detroit in search of frozen hobo bodies and colorful raccoon hunters.”
In Detroit, LeDuff clearly has a growing fan club, but some people find his act hard to take. That debate surfaced again last week on the DetroitYES online community forum, when an admirer opened a thread about LeDuff’s July 3 package that featured him golfing 18 miles through Detroit. That somewhat surreal piece was an 11-minute odyssey that showed unvarnished glimpses of city life as LeDuff, wearing shorts and knee-high black socks, whacked the ball through an abandoned house, the Packard Plant and down the middle of residential streets, some of which still had residences.
A forum participant with the screen name of Dexlin wrote: “Charlie is more often than not as contemptible a character as the fools he ambushes. A hipster mustache, irreverent attitude, and eccentric personality does not a good journalist make. Charlie ain't a journalist. He just plays one on TV, bless his heart.”
His inspiration includes “Jackass” and “60 Minutes”
Even some observers who appreciate LeDuff’s ability have reservations. Kiska, the UM-Dearborn professor, said: “Sometimes, LeDuff seems like a bit too much of a showboat, too much of a ham, too much of a loose cannon. For instance, he went on their air a few months ago and quoted a ‘source’ as saying that Dave Bing was going to resign for health reasons. He just sort of threw it in the middle of a report. Say what? What sources? Murray Feldman looked like he was in shock when Charlie threw it back to him.”
In 2007, the well known academic Todd Gitlin, writing in the Times, gave a generally positive review of LeDuff’s book about American men. He wrote LeDuff “has a distinct style” for “sociological poetry,” but added: “But Mr. LeDuff is also a child of this age of apparently casual, sometimes reckless self-disclosure.”
Some of LeDuff’s chief Detroit targets declined to comment for this story, though they have made it clear they dislike LeDuff’s tactics: Ficano, Cindy Pasky, the founder of Strategic Staffing Solutions who sued him, and Fred Wheeler, the deputy fire commissioner who was the subject of several LeDuff stories before Wheeler lost his job for slapping LeDuff’s mike onto W. Larned Street.
The on-screen madness seems to have a method behind it. LeDuff discusses concepts like “the image” and “disrupting the form” of broadcast journalism, and relates TV news to art like a guy who has a graduate degree from Berkeley.
“There’s nothing crazy about me,” he said during an interview as he soaked his feet in one of the baby swimming pools set around outdoor tables behind Dino’s bar on Woodward in Ferndale, not far from the Oakland County home he shares with his wife and young daughter.
LeDuff says the inspiration for his work comes from a variety of sources: “The New York Times meets Charles Kuralt, meets ‘60 Minutes’ -- because I studied for a time under Lowell Bergman -- meets ‘Jackass,’ meets ‘Borat’ meets YouTube meets the family photo album.”
There is one main rule, he adds:
Don’t be boring.
Episode II: Straight Outta Livonia
In the introduction to his first book, LeDuff wrote that he is descended from "fantastic nobodies, including "a pair of heavy-drinking lighthouse keepers, a sleepy morphine addict, a grave robber, a rumrunner, a streetwalker, a numbers maker, a dean of a sham college and a police informant."
He told readers about his grandfather who might have been a gangster, who dined with Jimmy Hoffa and “the underboss of the Bufalino crime family.”
He said he wrote about his relatives to show that “everybody’s got a history, that most everybody comes from nowhere and that in every family there is a cousin that no one wants to admit to.”
More directly, LeDuff comes from Portsmouth, Va., where he was born in 1966 while his father was stationed in the U.S. Navy during Vietnam. LeDuff also lived in Gary, Ind., and Westland, but he mostly grew up in Livonia.
“I’m just a guy from Joy Road and Wayne Road,” he said recently.
His parents divorced when he was young, and he once described himself to an interviewer as a latchkey kid in an environment of “a lot of drugs, a lot of rock-n-roll, a lot of tight jeans.”
He hated disco and loved Black Sabbath. He and his brothers had a fight club, and, he said, "they’re all snorting crystal T, which is powdered PCP, which is embalming dust, basically, and there was no one home. We were just out of control, but, again, the father figure was sketchy and my mom was working, trying to feed everybody. It was rough. We’d bounce to a house to an apartment when they got divorced; like six of us in a two-bedroom apartment in kind of a crappy suburb in Detroit.”
His first job in journalism: The New York Times
His mother ran a struggling flower shop at E. Jefferson and Marlborough in Detroit. When LeDuff was a teenager, he was working at the shop one day when he went across the street to a party store to buy a pop. Walking in, he saw the body of a black man in a pool of blood. He apparently had been shot by the store owner, an Arab American.
“The blood was congealing into a pancake on the dirty linoleum,” he wrote in an article for Mother Jones magazine in 2010. “His eyes and mouth were open and held that milky expression of a drunk who has fallen asleep with his eyes open. The red halo around his skull gave the scene a feeling of serenity.”
The store owner told him, “Forget what you saw, little man,” but LeDuff wrote that he has remembered the dead man in the faces of other victims of violence or misadventure, whether they were soldiers when he covered the Iraq war or members of his own family. His older sister, Nicole, who sometimes worked as a prostitute, died a decade ago when she jumped out of a speeding car on the West Side and flew into an oak tree. A stepbrother and niece died of drug overdoses.
As he got older, LeDuff was both a jock and a reader, and he graduated from the University of Michigan, taught at a charter school in Detroit and wandered the world: New York, Oakland, Calif.; Los Angeles; Denmark; Ireland, Australia and Alaska, where he says he lived in a tree house. He also jumped on freight trains and rode the rails for four months.
On a whim, he applied and was accepted to graduate school at one of the best public colleges in the world, the University of California at Berkley. He studied print journalism, TV news and documentaries.
After school, LeDuff was unable to find an internship at any medium and small newspaper and was ready to give up on the newspaper business. Then, out of the blue, the New York Times offered him a 10-week minority internship -- he is part Native American -- and he ended up spending 13 years at the paper.
Going undercover at a slaughterhouse
He covered a variety of stories in New York, the nation and the world for the Times, and was based in Los Angeles for his final years at the paper. As a young reporter he developed a reputation as someone in the vein of such famous New York newsmen as Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, who went beyond Big Apple glamor to write about regular New Yorkers in the outer boroughs and criticize the powerful. One reviewer said LeDuff tends to write “about folks who claw and hang on by their fingernails.” He also wrote a column called “Bending Elbows,” which examined life and people in New York bars. In 1999 he won Columbia University’s prestigious Mike Berger Award for outstanding reporting about New York City.
In 2000, the Times planned a series of stories to examine how issues of race play out on a daily basis in the Unites States. Editors told LeDuff to find a workplace where he could witness racial dynamics up close.
He applied for a job at the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C., and was hired using his own name and writing that he was currently employed. No one asked him what kind of work he was currently doing.
That was unfortunate for Smithfield. LeDuff turned his month of soul-numbing work hacking pig shoulders -- one every 17 seconds for each worker for eight and a half hours a day – into a novelistic account of the racial tensions, resentments and segregation among the massive plant’s employees, who are white, Native American, African-American and Mexican.
This was his first paragraph:
“It must have been 1 o’clock. That’s when the white man usually comes out of his glass office and stands on the scaffolding above the factory floor. He stood with his palms on the rails, his elbows out. He looked like a tower guard up there or a border agent. He stood with his head cocked.”
The overall series of 14 stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and LeDuff’s piece received wide acclaim. At Harvard University, an instructor at a journalism think tank commented: “LeDuff masterfully portrays the plant’s brutal conditions at the level of felt life—the smells, sounds, sensations, emotions and gruesome sights of the place...This is an excellent example for students.”
As the decade progressed, and the newspaper business searched for ways to save itself, the Times formed a partnership with the Discovery Channel, which opened the way for print journalists to move into TV. LeDuff was front and center, becoming host and creative producer of “Only in America,” a 10-part series of participatory journalism shows in which LeDuff hung out with bikers, rode in a gay rodeo and played arena football, among other adventures.
Trying to sell Detroit as a national story
Reviews were mixed. Variety, the entertainment paper, liked the series and called LeDuff a “modern-day Charles Kurault with a higher pain threshold.” But a freelance reviewer in his own paper was negative, underscoring the Charlieness of his reporting. “There's just too much of him, and he can't seem to get over himself,” wrote Carlo Rotello.
“It was uneven, for many reasons,” LeDuff said. “But it made money. Got watched a lot. Got replayed a lot. So that’s a success. I came back to the New York Times knowing a little bit more of the process” of doing TV.
LeDuff’s reputation grew because of his writing, reporting and video work, but his national standing took a hit when he had to deal with a charge of unethical behavior.
In 2003, after he wrote a page-one story about the Los Angeles River, a geography professor named Blake Gumprecht complained to the paper about similarities between the article and his 1999 book about the river. The Times eventually published an editors’ note.
It said, in part, that several passages from the article that related facts and lore about the river contained distilled passages from the book. And while the Times said LeDuff had confirmed those facts independently—through other sources or the reporter's first hand observation—the note concluded “the article should have acknowledged the significant contribution of Mr. Gumprecht's research.”
Also in 2003, after LeDuff had gone to work in the Times’ Los Angeles bureau, San Francisco magazine carried an article about a little-known incident that had taken place eight years earlier, when LeDuff was a graduate student in Berkeley. In 1995, he had apologized in the East Bay Monthly for having plagiarized some lines in an article he did for the magazine. The content in question came from Ted Conover’s book, “Rolling Nowhere: A Young Man's Adventures Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes.”
“It was graduate school,” LeDuff said. “I apologized in public and in print. When you make a mistake in life you apologize and move on. I’ve had a pretty good career. I’m not a cheater.”
LeDuff left the Times and in 2008 returned home, with his wife and baby daughter. While he felt disgruntled and burned-out at the paper, he has only good things today to say about working there.
“I’m a Timesman,” he said. “I’m always going to be Timesman. It’s their values I carry. It’s the most fair, balanced, bend-over-backwards-to-get-it right place I’ve ever known. I learned how to work at the Times. You get the documents and you read them.”
As his Times career was ending in 2007, the recession and housing collapse were percolating. LeDuff said he saw that there was a big story to be told in Detroit, and he pitched the idea of stationing himself in southeast Michigan to such outlets as Politico, the Associated Press, Washington Post and Time magazine. “I’ve got to be in Detroit,” he told editors.
But nobody wanted “a boutique guy” in Detroit, given the financial demands on corporate journalism these days, he said. “But I was sure Detroit was the story.”
And he believed the story was the collapse of the place where the middle class was invented, where people made things, and the place that might be signaling a trend for the rest of America.
The Detroit News offered him a chance to write and do videos, and to come back home for the first time permanently in nearly two decades. It was the year of Kwame Kilpatrick’s text messages, the collapse of General Motors and the death of Detroit fire fighter Walt Harris, whom LeDuff knew. A number of LeDuff’s family members had lost their jobs.
“It was insane,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is unbelievable.’”
The frozen man in an abandoned building, near a hockey game
At the paper he interviewed newsmakers at the American Coney Island, talked to political consultant Sam Riddle before he went to prison as they took showers in adjacent stalls and he convinced City Council President Monica Conyers to reenact her “Shrek” diatribe against fellow councilman Kenneth Cockrel Jr. That was crazy enough, but LeDuff got her to recite what Cockrel had said in the exchange, while he played the part of Conyers.
Those stories took place on camera, sort of a warm-up for his eventual job at Channel 2.
LeDuff also attracted attention for his bold writing, both in the freaky tales he told of Detroit and the major pieces that said, in essence, this place is falling apart.
He also managed to tell Detroit’s story to the nation. For Mother Jones, he delved into the murder of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the 7-year-old girl shot and killed during a police raid in 2010. LeDuff’s story was long and vivid and so filled with details and big-picture thoughts about Detroit’s killing fields that “On The Media,” the National Public Radio show, called him for an interview, which was carried coast to coast. “Your story on Aiyana Stanley-Jones serves as a record of the meaningless death of two kids,” host Brooke Gladstone told LeDuff.
His most memorable story appeared in January 2009 and captured the desperate and macabre side of Detroit for an eventual worldwide audience: The body of a homeless man, mostly encased in the ice of a flooded elevator, was found in an abandoned warehouse owned by billionaire Matty Moroun. An added curiosity: Young men were playing hockey near the body -- inside the warehouse.
The facts were stark enough, and LeDuff, who got the tip from his brother, who had heard about it from a friend, wrote the story as a parable about an uncaring metropolis, emphasizing what he said was the indifference of the hockey players and slow-reacting police, who were notified of the body by LeDuff.
It was a sensational scoop, and it attracted a lot of attention. A week later, Curt Guyette of the Metro Times wrote a long story that raised questions about some of the details in the story. Other media outlets did stories.
Ben Schmitt, a Free Press reporter who was friendly with LeDuff, received an assignment to follow up on the controversy the story had caused.
“My article noted inconsistencies in LeDuff’s accounting of police response to the frozen guy,” Schmitt recalled recently. “I called him for comment and he said: ‘Tell your editors to go fuck themselves.’”
The next day, after LeDuff had read Schmitt’s story, Schmitt’s phone rang. It was LeDuff.
“He called me at my desk and ordered me to step outside,” Schmitt said. “I reasoned with him, and told him he would have done the same thing. By the end of our conversation, I agreed to step outside and meet him at a coffee shop next door. I offered to buy the coffee.
According to Schmitt, LeDuff said: “All right. But I’m getting a mocha, motherfucker!”
LeDuff said the negative reaction made him angry, and today, he stands by the story as he wrote it.
In 2009, he said, when the "media machine" was chewing him up over the piece, he was relieved that his “elegant mother,” Evangeline, made him feel better.
“I’m proud of my boys," she said. "They did the right thing.”
Episode III: Sending a pooh-poor valentine to city all
LeDuff is psyching himself for a story.
He is not sure what the story is yet. He is squatting on the steps of an old fountain on Cadillac Square downtown, smoking a Winston, talking out loud. His partner, photojournalist Bob Schedlbower, stands nearby.
The two men are brainstorming ideas based on the announcement hours earlier that day last month that a Novi businessman, Kriss Andrews, will become Detroit’s program management director, a key position in the new consent agreement bureaucracy that is supposed to stabilize city finances.
“We want to welcome him to Detroit,” says LeDuff, who is smiling and wearing blue jeans, black motorcycle boots and a green tie decorated with images of Christmas ornaments.
But that is not exactly what they want to do. They really want to do a piece that will needle Andrews and show viewers the stunning challenges he faces, and underscore that a guy from distant Novi has been picked for the job.
“I'm feeling it now," says LeDuff.
"It will be a pooh-pooh valentine,” he concedes. Then, in an exaggerated motion, he tugs on an imaginary door, mimicking someone trying to enter a Detroit police district office after 4 p.m. -- when they close these days -- “to serve you better,” as the signs proclaim in the lobbies.
Sarcasm, irreverence and off-the-wall humor are not the usual ingredients of local TV news. But traditional assumptions about what appeals to viewers have gone out the window at Fox 2 since LeDuff came on board in the late fall of 2010 and began attracting a following by mixing pratfalls, participatory journalism and old-fashioned scoops.
LeDuff, an award-winning reporter at the New York Times for most of his career who grew up in Livonia, has angered a number of government and business officials with his coverage, but Channel 2’s leadership and officials at Fox headquarters in New York are watching him approvingly.
“I have not seen, in my time at Fox 2, anyone talked about as fast as Charlie has been talked about,” said Dana Hahn, the station’s vice president for news. “He’s getting attention.”
In the Detroit market, Channel 2, with its edgy, loud, in-your-face, grass-roots, “Let It Rip,” “Hall-of-Shame,” Charlie Langton vibe, is a good fit for LeDuff. But he has his admirers and critics, as anyone in metro Detroit can discover by bringing up his name.
“Our approach is not to shy away from things as they are and calling things out,” said Hahn. “It makes some people uncomfortable and others angry.”
Using passersby as participants in stories
On the day of the project manager story, LeDuff asks passersby on the street what they think of the new project manager. Virtually everyone shares his feeling that there was something absurd in appointing a businessman from Novi to help straighten out Detroit, especially because some of them had heard that Andrews ran a company that went into bankruptcy.
Not only does LeDuff incorporate some of their comments into his piece, but he incorporates some of the people themselves into the piece.
Perhaps inventing a verb, Schedlbower calls LeDuff’s consultation with people he encounters “focus-grouping” a story, and he says LeDuff focus-groups the story throughout the day.
Schedlbower explained: “It’s a dynamic process. The story will evolve based on the feedback we get while we’re doing the story. I’ve never worked with a reporter who did that.”
At the outset of his reporting, LeDuff invites a man walking down the street to go on camera. He is 48-year-old Bruce Belle, an Ecorse resident, who is looking sharp in a light blue shirt and pants, a white fedora and long hair, carefully coiffed. At LeDuff’s direction, he stands on the side of city hall, his arms folded across his chest and his head cocked, looking tough and skeptical, while LeDuff introduces the story.
“Well, Detroit's got a new project manager,” LeDuff says into the camera, his voice rising. “What's that? That's the $220,000 man who will oversee the remaking of Detroit. His name is Kriss Andrews. And his qualifications? He's the chief financial officer of a bankrupt solar panel company.
“But let's not get negative. This is still a honeymoon. Mr. Andrews, welcome to Detroit. I don't know the last time you've been here since you're way out there in Novi, but there's a lot of work to do.”
LeDuff and Schedlbower have only a couple of hours to do their story, so after city hall, they race to Eastern Market for the next bit. En route, LeDuff rehearses lines, tongue-in-cheek, in his on-camera voice and talks is a stream-of conscious manner.
“They close police stations at 4. BUT NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS AT NIGHT, he says. “My daughter’s goldfish died today. We had it one day…They like to blame stuff on poor, illiterate Detroit. They do. They’ve been screwed for so long.
On Feb. 2, LeDuff continued his full court press against Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano with a story about the county’s relationship with Strategic Staff Solutions, a company founded and run by Cindy Pasky, a well known corporate leader in downtown revitalization.
His report said S3, as it’s known, had received a no-bid contract extension from Wayne County to make improvements to a call center it was already running. He also noted S3 executives have donated “thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to Bob” Ficano over the last five years. He noted Pasky served on the board of a non-profit that has a close relationship with Ficano and the county.
And he pretended to be asleep while waiting to talk on the phone to Pasky, and said he had left a message.
In an unusual move for a corporate leader in Detroit, Pasky filed a lawsuit against the station, LeDuff and a producer, claiming the story contained several inaccuracies that defamed Pasky and S3. The suit said LeDuff never attempted to contact Pasky and that he had declined information from S3’s public relations representative, Bob Berg, that the company believes would have refuted any allegation of improper activity.
LeDuff and his producer “refused to even listen to the truth and then lied about their communication with S3 in order to further their false and scandalous theme,” the suit charged.
Fox 2 and S3 announced a settlement last month.
As part of the resolution, Fox 2 agreed to remove from its website the Feb. 2 report, and station anchors read on the air a statement that said, in part: "Following that report, we were contacted by representatives of S3, who assured us that the contract was awarded in full compliance with the county's procurement rules and regulations. It was not our intent to assert or imply that there was any improper conduct on the part of S3. We regret if anyone misinterpreted our report."
As part of the settlement, both sides agreed not to talk about it.
While not discussing the S3 case, Hahn, the Fox 2 chief, said LeDuff’s stories on Ficano have been “factually correct,” adding: “I know we dot our I’s and cross our T’s. We give everyone a fair shake.
Asked if she sometimes disagreed with LeDuff on stories, Hahn paused, and said yes.
“We work together,” Hahn said. “We’re a team. We sometimes have heated, creative debates.”
At times, she said, she and LeDuff walk outside the station and hash out their differences in the parking lot.
“He’s passionate, and so am I,” Hahn said. “When I hired him I told him I would stand behind him and support him.”
After months of battling on TV over everything from county pensions to Ficano’s property tax, LeDuff went to Ficano’s home one night and they had a beer. They talked, man to man. Both declined to elaborate.
LeDuff and Schedlbower film in the parking lot next to the Detroit Fire Department repair shop in Eastern Market. LeDuff talks to a young woman wearing a high school graduation cap and asks her to stand in the background. He jumps out of the back of a broken-down EMS rig and says to the camera, “Detroit’s got a new project manager. FROM NOVI! Lots to fix!”
Packing up gear, LeDuff says, “Our bosses don’t even know what we’re doing.” He and Schedlbower originally planned to do another story today, but it would gave required working overnight. That wasn’t a problem; they’ve worked overnight before. But LeDuff wants to walk his daughter to school tomorrow for the last time. It will be her final day of kindergarten; she’ll have to be driven to grade school next year.
They decide they need to remind the new project manager that Detroit transportation is a mess, so they drive rapidly into the yard next to the Department of Transportation on E. Warren. The guard booth is empty. LeDuff jumps out of the car, steps into one of the dozens of parked buses, performs another riff for the camera, and they drive off.
“Sweet,” says LeDuff.
“Gonzo journalism,” says Schedlbower.
Searching for his roots and finding a scoop
LeDuff likes “participatory journalism because he thinks it’s important to feel and experience what people are doing and not just sit and listen to them talk about what they do.
Earlier this year, he reported on how he gone out and traced the roots of his family. LeDuff always had understood his ancestry was Native American and Cajun, the French-speaking people from Louisiana. His great grandfather came from Baton Rouge.
But after searching records and talking to people, LeDuff said he learned that his great grandfather was a black man while he lived in the south, and a white man after he got off the train in Detroit in the World War I era. His skin was light enough so that he could pass as white in Detroit. His wife, who had darker skin, rarely left the house, LeDuff reported.
“We weren’t Cajuns like I’d been told, but Creoles, Louisiana people who were born black but lived in Detroit as white,” LeDuff told viewers. He discussed the indignities and insecurity of living in Detroit between the wars if you were black, which his grandfather managed to avoid.
He traveled to the south and interviewed relatives. He talked on camera to his mom, and to his dad, whom he hadn’t seen in 10 years. His dad said, “We’ve all been prejudiced, and I probably have been also. And here I was talking about myself.”
Said LeDuff: “I’m proud to be white, like I said, but I’m also proud to know I share a history with other peoples. And I understand what my great grandfather did, but it didn’t solve anything. I mean, look around, we can’t keep living like this because it’s all messed up.”
One of the final stops while doing the Kriss Andrews’ project manager story is the intersection of Grandy and Ferry, south of the General Motors’ Poletown Plant on Detroit’s near east side. Many houses are gone; many of the remaining homes are abandoned and charred. The landscape is overgrown and lush.
Gilbert Davis, 47, who has lived in the area his entire life, greets LeDuff warmly. He calls the neighborhood “Nightmare on Grandy.”
LeDuff and Schedlbower film the basement of an abandoned home that is filled with water. Davis, commenting on the M.O. of Detroit’s killers, says, “After you murder someone you throw them in here and light them on fire.”
He adds: They found two down there with their underwear around their legs. They didn’t put them on the news.”
LeDuff and Schedlbower stow their gear and start to drive off. One of Davis’ neighbors waves and calls out to LeDuff.
“Don’t give up on us down here, man.”
The story ran on the 6 p.m. news.
Bruce Bell, the man in blue from Ecorse who joined LeDuff on the city hall lawn, had a four-word speaking role.
Showing lots of attitude, he looked at the camera, addressed Andrews and said: "Get the job done."
