"He wrote like he was avenging a death"
May 18, 2018 3:34 PM Subscribe
In 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, colorful television news reporter, author, future GQ Madman of the Year and Detroit icon Charlie LeDuff golfed through a section of his beloved home city (18 miles. 2,525 strokes,) to highlight its abandonment and urban decay, using hulking industrial relics as his sand traps and everyday Detroiters as his gallery. In the process, he came across a mom trying to find her suicidal daughter, a disgruntled cop and a generous deacon. 6 years later, he's left journalism, written a new book and is "redoing" his life.
Background
Mr. LeDuff won a Pulitzer for the New York Times article, "How Race is Lived in America: At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die" (2000)
He spent 12 years at the New York Times (article archive), then returned to Detroit, working the Metro beat for the Detroit Times. After 2 years, he left the paper to work for a local Fox television station. He also contributed articles to Vice (article archive).
His reporting about Motor City "covered the city's cataclysmic unraveling. He destroyed the careers of at least a dozen Detroit politicians, helped send about half those corrupt officials to prison and simply made a damned fool out of several more." Including Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, "two police chiefs, one fire commissioner and two deputy fire commissioners. Also, a police inspector aptly named Don Johnson who got caught sending a photo of his penis to a female subordinate." LeDuff also managed to get himself arrested and charged with aggravated assault for biting a guy, public urination and being verbally abusive to a group of undercover female police officers at a St. Patrick's Day parade.
In 2010, he published an article in Mother Jones, "What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?" which tells the story of a seven-year-old killed during a SWAT raid gone wrong. Interview with CJR: "LeDuff’s stark and meticulously reported piece spreads out from the single tragedy to explore the darkest corners of the city in which he grew up and to which he has returned—rampant crime, imploding industry, corruption, poverty."
Also see his piece on photographer Robert Frank, "Unsentimental Journey" in Vanity Fair.
While at Fox 2 Detroit, he created feature segments called "The Americans." (YouTube Playlist.) Notable examples include:
* Squatting in a House Occupied by a Squatter
*Canoeing the Rouge River (the most polluted in Michigan.) Previously on MeFi.
* Wayne County Serves Up Cat Food-Like Meals
* Go Ahead, Take a Bath. It's the Detroit Police. (Just how long does it take the Detroit police to respond to a call? LeDuff waits with a Detroit woman for hours after her home was burglarized to illustrate Detroit's slow police response times. During the wait, LeDuff picks up fast food, goes back after the woman says she doesn't want ice in her tea, and then takes a bubble bath.)
GQ:
LeDuff gave a Ted Talk back in 2013: Orange Drink and Kicking the Can Down the Road. And he appeared on The Colbert Report while hawking his Autopsy book. His latest book, "Sh*tshow!: The Country's Collapsing and the Ratings Are Great" will be coming out next week.
Background
Mr. LeDuff won a Pulitzer for the New York Times article, "How Race is Lived in America: At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die" (2000)
He spent 12 years at the New York Times (article archive), then returned to Detroit, working the Metro beat for the Detroit Times. After 2 years, he left the paper to work for a local Fox television station. He also contributed articles to Vice (article archive).
His reporting about Motor City "covered the city's cataclysmic unraveling. He destroyed the careers of at least a dozen Detroit politicians, helped send about half those corrupt officials to prison and simply made a damned fool out of several more." Including Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, "two police chiefs, one fire commissioner and two deputy fire commissioners. Also, a police inspector aptly named Don Johnson who got caught sending a photo of his penis to a female subordinate." LeDuff also managed to get himself arrested and charged with aggravated assault for biting a guy, public urination and being verbally abusive to a group of undercover female police officers at a St. Patrick's Day parade.
In 2010, he published an article in Mother Jones, "What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?" which tells the story of a seven-year-old killed during a SWAT raid gone wrong. Interview with CJR: "LeDuff’s stark and meticulously reported piece spreads out from the single tragedy to explore the darkest corners of the city in which he grew up and to which he has returned—rampant crime, imploding industry, corruption, poverty."
Also see his piece on photographer Robert Frank, "Unsentimental Journey" in Vanity Fair.
While at Fox 2 Detroit, he created feature segments called "The Americans." (YouTube Playlist.) Notable examples include:
* Squatting in a House Occupied by a Squatter
*Canoeing the Rouge River (the most polluted in Michigan.) Previously on MeFi.
* Wayne County Serves Up Cat Food-Like Meals
* Go Ahead, Take a Bath. It's the Detroit Police. (Just how long does it take the Detroit police to respond to a call? LeDuff waits with a Detroit woman for hours after her home was burglarized to illustrate Detroit's slow police response times. During the wait, LeDuff picks up fast food, goes back after the woman says she doesn't want ice in her tea, and then takes a bubble bath.)
GQ:
Besides being the author of a best-selling book about how fucked Detroit is (Detroit: An American Autopsy, published earlier this year), Charlie got famous by basically reinventing local news reporting. Like for instance, in one segment he waits with a woman who has called 911 after her house was apparently broken into. He picks her up some McDonald’s, searches her house for assailants, washes his pants, and takes a bath, all hours before the cops arrive. (Asterisk on this one: probably the only segment in the history of local network news in which producers at the station had to pixlize a reporter’s balls.) A million people watched that on YouTube—not including the people who watched it on TV, or on the station’s website, etc.—which is 40 percent more than the population of Detroit. Or in another segment, Charlie plays a game of golf across an eighteen-mile swath of Detroit in a pair of old sneakers and some shorts to show just how empty the place is. (As he’ll remind me over the course of the days we spend together, you could fit Manhattan and San Francisco into just the abandoned portions of Detroit.) Or earlier this year, in a piece that’s become known as A Plant, a Perch, and a Prophylactic, Charlie and a cameraman canoed the length of the infamous River Rouge, which turned into kind of an antic tone poem about desolation and environmental degradation and the modern urban landscape. All of these videos had a life of their own outside the realm of broadcast journalism. All of them became, for lack of less annoying phraseology, viral videos illustrating something about Detroit.Detroit Metro Times (2015): Is Charlie LeDuff really a philistine, or one of the savviest media personalities of our time?
Now, Charlie still considers himself an investigative reporter. He claims, since he came to Fox 2 News three years ago, that his reporting has been responsible for the firing of two Detroit police chiefs and a fire commissioner. In the year when Detroit finally seemed to reach the unsurprising conclusion to its thirty-year narrative of decline—i.e., it’s the first major American city in modern times to declare bankruptcy—it was Charlie LeDuff who reported on it in a way that made sense to people who aren’t, like, super into Chapter 9 filings.
LeDuff gave a Ted Talk back in 2013: Orange Drink and Kicking the Can Down the Road. And he appeared on The Colbert Report while hawking his Autopsy book. His latest book, "Sh*tshow!: The Country's Collapsing and the Ratings Are Great" will be coming out next week.
Wow - zarq - I haven't dug into any of this yet but this looks AMAZING and that is a fabulous, fabulous FPP. Thank you.
posted by kristi at 6:04 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by kristi at 6:04 PM on May 18, 2018 [4 favorites]
Very little makes me regret leaving a career in journalism but damn that guy looks like he’s having a lot of fun.
posted by not_the_water at 7:19 PM on May 18, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by not_the_water at 7:19 PM on May 18, 2018 [3 favorites]
Autopsy is very good.
posted by doctornemo at 7:45 PM on May 18, 2018
posted by doctornemo at 7:45 PM on May 18, 2018
This will provoke some Detroiters:
Sure, downtown looks spiffier than ever with the billions in investment (often attached to sweetheart deals, land swaps, and other breaks financed on the taxpayers’ backs) that poured in. But if you dig, the New Detroit looks a lot like the old one.
posted by doctornemo at 7:46 PM on May 18, 2018
Sure, downtown looks spiffier than ever with the billions in investment (often attached to sweetheart deals, land swaps, and other breaks financed on the taxpayers’ backs) that poured in. But if you dig, the New Detroit looks a lot like the old one.
posted by doctornemo at 7:46 PM on May 18, 2018
I know him irl, and he’s just awesome. Should be an HBO detective series.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:48 PM on May 18, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by Ideefixe at 8:48 PM on May 18, 2018 [7 favorites]
working the Metro beat for the Detroit Times
The Detroit Times hasn't existed since 1960. I assume this was meant to say The Detroit News, since LeDuff never wrote for the Free Press as far as I know.
posted by axiom at 9:21 PM on May 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Detroit Times hasn't existed since 1960. I assume this was meant to say The Detroit News, since LeDuff never wrote for the Free Press as far as I know.
posted by axiom at 9:21 PM on May 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
LeDuff is great. I also have to recommend Detroit: An American Autopsy. It's Hunter S. Thompson's style with David Simon's empathy for people living on the margins, and both men's disdain for politicians. Since you are on Metafilter, I know you've watched The Wire all the way through at least five times, so you will enjoy this book!
LeDuff wrote a story about Flint for the New Yorker in February, so I think he may only be semi-retired. I don't see him as someone who is going to stay away from journalism for very long.
[psst - proper Vanity Fair link]
posted by riruro at 9:30 PM on May 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
LeDuff wrote a story about Flint for the New Yorker in February, so I think he may only be semi-retired. I don't see him as someone who is going to stay away from journalism for very long.
[psst - proper Vanity Fair link]
posted by riruro at 9:30 PM on May 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
Seems like the last of the midcentury salt-of-the-earth , fight-for-the-little-guy, city newspaper columnist types
posted by thelonius at 3:37 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 3:37 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Detroit Times hasn't existed since 1960
Doh! Oh man.
Yes, The Detroit News. Thanks for the correction!
--
Taz, riruro,thank you for the proper link and the fix. Also for noting that he's still writing!
kristi, thank you! Enjoy!
posted by zarq at 5:43 AM on May 19, 2018
Doh! Oh man.
Yes, The Detroit News. Thanks for the correction!
--
Taz, riruro,thank you for the proper link and the fix. Also for noting that he's still writing!
kristi, thank you! Enjoy!
posted by zarq at 5:43 AM on May 19, 2018
In 2009, LeDuff wrote a piece for The Detroit News called "Frozen in Indifference" about the discovery of a body frozen in midwinter ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft in an abandonded building which recieved wide notice. The paper's website does not seem to have retained it.
posted by mwhybark at 9:41 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by mwhybark at 9:41 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]
mwhybark: Could this be it? It's from a different website, and several papers seem to have written about this event, but this one at least has LeDuff's byline.
posted by myotahapea at 10:54 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by myotahapea at 10:54 AM on May 19, 2018 [2 favorites]
Jeez. That slaughterhouse article in the Times in 2000 was just astonishingly good. Cannot wait to read these links. thanks!
posted by allthinky at 10:58 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by allthinky at 10:58 AM on May 19, 2018 [1 favorite]
Yes, that appears to be the whole story. The reposter includes the now-bitrotted link to the original Detroit News web publication.
posted by mwhybark at 12:35 PM on May 19, 2018
posted by mwhybark at 12:35 PM on May 19, 2018
Here's a public-corruption story from January. I bet the guy couldn't keep himself from writing about this stuff even if he tried.
posted by mwhybark at 12:55 PM on May 19, 2018
posted by mwhybark at 12:55 PM on May 19, 2018
This will provoke some Detroiters
Maybe some recent arrivals might be offended. The old-school Detroiters have always known this to be true.
posted by praemunire at 11:21 AM on May 20, 2018
Maybe some recent arrivals might be offended. The old-school Detroiters have always known this to be true.
posted by praemunire at 11:21 AM on May 20, 2018
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everything about this yes.
I mean yeah he's not suffering to make the rent while working a day job but I can't fault him for feeling true about this. It's not his fault America doesn't give a fuck about people.
posted by nikaspark at 4:29 PM on May 18, 2018 [8 favorites]