Detroit gets another 15 or so minutes of infamy Sunday night when "60 Minutes" broadcasts a report on the city, its troubles and its future.
Bob Simon, the award-winning reporter, below, with Dan Gilbert, spent time in Detroit in late August, and producers began reporting the story weeks earlier, searching for locations and interview subjects.
Update, 12:18 a.m.: In an interview with JC Reindl of the Free Press, Simon said that of all the places he has visited in more than four decades of reporting, much of it as a foreign correspondent, Detroit reminds him most of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, left.
“And Mogadishu is the worst place I’ve ever been,” said Simon, 72. “Not the worst place in terms of danger, but the worst place in terms of what it looks like.”
The report pays a lot of attention to Gilbert, the Quicken Loans founder, whose building-buying and downtown strategizing is old news in metro Detroit but not in the rest of the country.
From a CBS News press release:
Dan Gilbert already had a fortune from founding the mortgage company Quicken Loans. Now he stands to make even more by buying office buildings on the cheap in Detroit’s economically depressed downtown and convincing tenants to move into them to help the ailing city. It’s working, he tells Bob Simon, and for anyone who would say he’s a greedy capitalist, his answer is he is essentially doing a lot of good for a city that’s seen a lot of bad. Simon’s story about Detroit, the largest American city to ever file for bankruptcy, will be broadcast Sunday, Oct. 13 (7 p.m.).
"60 Minutes" airs locally on WWJ-TV.
