Charle LeDuff and I are in the studio he fashioned with his own bare hands out of the attic of American Coney Island in downtown Detroit. In a few minutes, his podcast, The No B.S. News Hour, begins a midday Monday livestream, but we’ve been going round and round about something and it’s making him cranky.
“Why do you come in here before my show arguing with me about this?” he snaps. “I’m telling you my feelings.”
Well, maybe. I decide to keep pushing, to ignore the awkwardness of the moment, to badger my witness. You know, Charlie LeDuff-style. And a few moments later, he gives away the game.
The topic at hand: whether it was legal and appropriate for political action committees supporting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to run campaign ads built around a clip of Republican nominee Tudor Dixon enthusiastically telling LeDuff she’d force a raped teen to bear her uncle’s baby. That clip, with LeDuff’s mustache, the bifocals propped on his forehead, his pinstripes-and-vest outfit — all of it became the indelible image and a pivotal moment of the 2022 campaign.
LeDuff demanded Whitmer and her PACs take the ads down. They did not. On a local radio show in August 2022, he claimed that video of this extremely relevant remark by a gubernatorial contender did not qualify as “fair use.” In his Detroit News column, LeDuff called the footage “purloined.”
But Charlie LeDuff knows better. He’s a 57-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York Times correspondent with a journalism master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He knows nothing illegal or unusual transpired. Yet even now, when it doesn’t matter anymore, he’ll still argue about it.
“It’s not settled case law,” he tells me. “There was nothing transformative about what they did with it. It wasn’t commentary.”
Of course, it absolutely was commentary. Team Whitmer used the clip to support an argument that Dixon was too radical to be elected. And after a few more rhetorical pingpongs, LeDuff levels with me: He just wanted to grab some headlines and shame Whitmer into coming on his show. He’s been after her for years to answer questions about her handling of elderly COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and the veracity or absence of the data on it.
“What was that really about?” he says. Suddenly, in an almost British, intentionally theatrical accent, he pretends to be speaking to her: “I resent, madam, that you think you can take that, but for four years, you’re so afraid of me you can’t sit down and answer a question. That’s the gall of all gall.” Then, back in native LeDuff, he admits: “That’s really what I was doing.”
It didn’t work. Whitmer, sitting on a big polling lead, gave precious few interviews in the final months of the campaign. (Full disclosure: She turned me down for Newsweek, too.) And, as a Whitmer aide told me later, they certainly weren’t going to risk her talking to LeDuff.
His producers are reminding LeDuff the show is about to begin. He plops down on the ledge of a bay window behind his desk and, per usual, places a 2-foot mic stand between his hanging legs as if he’s straddling it. He lights a cigarette; it occurs to me it has been decades since I’ve been in a workspace where people smoked. (The next day, my husband would refer to my still-stinking laundry as my “Charlie LeDuff clothes.”)
LeDuff sucks on the cig while a pretaped cold open unspools in which LeDuff points out the lack of progress on the construction of the planned skyscraper at the former Hudson’s department store site. It “never seems to get any taller, not in the last eight months. The only thing I see them swinging around is a port-a-john. That’s what they’re doing with 60 million of your dollars.”
Another episode begins.
I am going to admit something now that journalists rarely do, but if you’re profiling a rule-breaking reporter, it seems proper to break a few yourself: I came into this assignment eager to write about Charlie LeDuff as a clown and a weirdo.
Not being a viewer of local TV news and vaguely aware of the fact that we overlapped for a while in the years I wrote regularly for The Times, I knew him primarily as the author of a well-reviewed book on the downfall of Detroit I should’ve but hadn’t read, for that Tudor Dixon clip and his attention-seeking complaints about its use, and for wacky pieces for Fox 2 Detroit that had gone viral.
You may know the ones. LeDuff golfing across 18 miles of desolate, abandoned Detroit. LeDuff canoeing the disgustingly polluted Rouge River, a camera lingering on a floating condom as John Denver’s “Sunshine on My Shoulders” plays ironically. LeDuff road-tripping with the KKK to a South Carolina rally, confusing one of the racists by offering him an actual cracker. LeDuff eating out of a dumpster. LeDuff offering himself to Donald Trump as his 2016 running mate at a Trump press conference. LeDuff illustrating the Detroit police’s slow response times by waiting with a woman who had called 911 about a burglary and having the time to buy her McDonald’s, wash his pants, and take a bath before they show up.
The common denominator there is LeDuff doing wacky things — Stunts? Antics? Performance art? — that you just never see on local TV news. All of it makes most journalists trained not to “become” the story very uncomfortable and, in their heart of hearts, a little jealous.
In a million years, most of these ideas would never occur to other TV journalists. And even if they did, would those well-coifed, square-jawed, expert small-talkers be willing to place their egos, their well-crafted images, and their physical well-being at risk to execute them? Why bother when all your job really requires is to stand in front of a crime scene or outside in bad weather jabbering into a mic?
LeDuff explains his approach: “I do look at journalism as art, so if there’s some showmanship, why not? People are so bored. But if you’ve hung out with me at all, you know I insist we get it right as best we can. But even at The New York Times, I wondered why we work our asses off to show the world how things work only to have Jon Stewart or John Oliver take our work, cut the bullshit out of it, make it entertaining, and make people think. We should do that.”
By the time he tells me this, I have, in fact, started to see the method — and the sincerity — to the madness. He’s not just bellowing at city hall or Lansing or large corporations because it’s a thing to do; he can back up a rant about subsidies or tax breaks for General Motors or Ford or Rock Ventures with a dizzying litany of completely accurate financial citations that only come from a lot of research. He spends Sundays in bed, he says, reading public documents.
“You know, people read the paper in the morning? I just go through the chemical analysis of soil, I go through [Office of the Inspector General] reports. And it’s interesting.”
He’s also, strangely for someone so peripatetic and offbeat, surprisingly proper. When he goes on TV as a talking head, he typically dresses up. He uses words like “sir” and “madam.” When I mention to him that a mutual Times friend told me he mooned his colleagues at his going-away party, he is quick to clarify that that happened at a bar and not in the office. Because the office is not a place for such things, I guess.
Not everything LeDuff tries while I’m following him around works. In one bit that borders on transphobic, he compares famous people wearing red dresses — Gretchen Whitmer, Caitlyn Jenner, notorious fabulist and occasional drag queen New York Rep. George Santos — in a who-wore-it-best gag.
In another, a cold open for his show, he affects a little girl’s voice asking her father to build her a snowman, and then, well, it becomes a joke about fellatio. There’s a whole episode where he debates a flat-earther about whether the planet is round, which seemed, for a guy like LeDuff who chastises the media for wasting time on frivolity, like an hour better spent on something real.
The seat-of-the-pants, gonzo gloss in which he coats himself sometimes undermines his intellect, but it’s a trade he makes to hold the public’s interest.
“Some people didn’t think he had journalistic integrity, or they thought he was too crass or too rude or didn’t understand it or thought he was really about himself,” says former Fox 2 Detroit news producer Connie Smith, who worked closely with LeDuff for years. “But really, he just has this really creative way of telling somebody else’s story. It does draw attention to him, like when he squats with a person or walks around like a chicken. It’s crazy, but it does get attention.”
Then Smith says something that sounds like a backhanded compliment but that LeDuff himself probably would love: “He is way smarter than most people think he is, or how he looks. His appearance does not match his intellect.”
Charles Royal LeDuff was born on April Fools’ Day in 1966 in Virginia and raised in Westland by a florist mother who would cycle through three husbands. That upbringing gave him a keen appreciation for working-class people, for Middle America, for getting dirt under your fingernails.
The same curiosity that led him to try to figure out what people in power are up to and how governments operate also motivated him to understand how to work with his hands in ways few well-educated national journalists ever do.
It has paid off in fascinating ways. As a teen, for example, he learned to lay sod from his uncle. A decade or so later, as a Times reporter, he gained the trust of Mexican day laborers by laying sod with them at a Long Island manor.
Those connections eventually led to one of his proudest journalistic feats, one he cites regularly to bolster his bona fides on the topic of immigration, in which he flew to Mexico and traveled with U.S.-bound migrants as they crossed the border. Thus began a lifelong interest in border politics. As recently as last November, he went to Texas to do some intrepid reporting on how easy it remains to enter the country illegally.
He spent years after he graduated from the University of Michigan bouncing around the world. In 1992, the Ann Arbor Observer included him in a collection of profiles of a newfangled thing they called “slackers,” LeDuff looking handsome and super cool posing on a roof somewhere with a cigarette dangling from his fingers.
Even then he was oddly misunderstood as lazy or a little strange; the magazine quietly mocked him for doing “important” things like making beeswax-and-rose-petals lip balm to send his girlfriend in Alaska. But far from being uninspired or lacking ambition, he also said then: “As far as I know this is my only life, and I want it to be something incendiary. Something big.”
Three years later, when LeDuff landed at The Times with a 10-week minority internship (he’s one-eighth Chippewa), he worried about how he’d fit in. The place was so high-brow and stuffy; he fixates with me on the fact that reporters there used the word “ebullient” a lot, and he chafed at the paper’s unnecessarily fancy writing.
“I got there, and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, what am I doing here?’” he tells me. “I decided, ‘I’m just going to write the cadence in my head, the way that I think and feel.’”
Here he protests too much; his own writing is lyrical and vivid. His vocabulary is sophisticated. He may admire the sparse prose of Hemingway, but LeDuff’s words can be decorative and full of apt, inventive analogies. He plays the stooge sometimes — and may even occasionally regard himself that way — but he’s no stooge. It was his ability to sniff out an intriguing, original narrative that helped him stand out.
Sent off to the police department to gather up some crime briefs in those early months, he spotted a report of a 13-person brawl and spun it into a Hatfield-McCoy-esque tale between Puerto Rican and Cuban families that reflected certain realities about Brooklyn’s changing demographics.
One Fourth of July, he was sent out to capture some “color” anecdotes for a de rigueur holiday story; he stumbled upon a colony of cross-dressing sex workers that he persuaded his editors to turn into a longer stand-alone piece.
“That one was pretty good,” he tells me. (On Twitter earlier this year, a progressive activist questioned that 28-year-old story for its outmoded, lurid approach to covering trans people, right down to the headline reference to “he-shes.”)
Some at The Times appreciated his unusual eye; some didn’t. He got stuck in a supposedly dead-end bureau (Long Island) but also drew interest from an editor overseeing profiles for a series about race in America who sent him to write about the highly segregated workforce of a North Carolina slaughterhouse. The series won LeDuff and its other contributors a shared Pulitzer Prize.
He’d help cover 9/11, got reassigned to the Los Angeles bureau, took a four-month turn being sent to Iraq to cover the war. From his LA perch, he gallivanted around America as host of a Times co-production with Discovery called Only in America in which he travels with a biker gang, attempts to ride a bull at a gay rodeo, and gets naked and badly sunburned at a Burning Man event.
He turned those adventures into a book that explored American masculinity called US Guys and, in 2007, quit The Times while on paternity leave. At the time, his editor said he was leaving to promote the book, but LeDuff says now he’d just had enough after 11 years at the pinnacle of mainstream national journalism.
The birth of his daughter, he says, changed his priorities. “I wanted her to know my mother, my wife’s mother, her cousins, her family,” he says. “As the world gets closer, you have to be from somewhere. So let’s go home. And here we are.” Home, of course, to Detroit.
It’s not easy to get people to talk about Charlie LeDuff. The list of people I tried to reach about him — Tudor Dixon; favorite target and ex-Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano; colleagues at The Times and Fox 2; Whitmer campaign operatives — is too long to recite.
Even an online troll who recently tweeted about LeDuff’s allegedly hiding some part of his personal biography respectfully declined comment.
“They’re afraid of how he’s going to react to them saying it, because he will come for you,” Smith says. “People just didn’t really want to get on his bad side. He’s very confrontational. We had an executive producer who is very much nonconfrontational, does not like to get into the face of anybody, and he would get into screaming matches with her. And it would make her cry.”
It’s more than that, though. In the 15 years since he came back to Michigan, LeDuff bounced from a two-year reporting stint at The Detroit News; spent seven years at Fox 2, during which his wild pieces became so famous they aired on local news stations across the country; wrote two more books; made countless TV appearances; and, eventually, launched his podcast.
But then came the COVID-19 pandemic and, with it, LeDuff’s hard-charging attacks on Whitmer’s decision to force nursing homes to care for COVID patients despite the risk to other residents.
Even now, he can’t relent: “Ninety-nine percent of people that got COVID got a runny nose. The average age of the person that died was 76 years old. We knew that from the beginning.” (He’s close: The percentage of people who experienced mild symptoms is closer to 80 percent, but the overall fatality rate of COVID patients is about 2 percent. 75.5 percent of deaths have been of people 65 and older.) He’s been on a hunt for years for information about how many of Michigan’s COVID deaths occurred at facilities for the elderly.
“Where’s our data?” he asks me. “It’s messy in the beginning. I expect [Whitmer] to be better than that. … I asked for the data. They won’t give it. I gotta sue the state. … Turns out, we didn’t bother to count them. … I’ll never forgive it.”
To his mind, this is a major betrayal of the public interest by Whitmer, and he’s still pissed it barely registered as an issue in her reelection bid. “I’m from the people nobody gives a f— about. Not highfalutin, not the best-educated people that live in Cape Cod. People who gotta rent. People missing a tooth maybe. You know what I mean? Good people.”
LeDuff saw himself as doing honest journalism, asking important questions, and refusing to relent. But many Democrats found his merciless attacks on Whitmer offensive — especially when he went on Fox News to do it.
On Tucker Carlson’s show in January 2022, he ranted: “We shut down schools. We shut down business. We shut down sports. We ruined the economy. To what? To stop deaths. Of whom? The elderly. … We lied about it. … We blew it, man. And somebody’s gotta go.”
Around the same time, though, he strayed into speculation about the kidnapping-murder plot against Whitmer, going on Carlson’s show to make the case that the perpetrators were egged on by the FBI and that the whole affair wasn’t really all that serious. Tell that to the three would-be kidnappers now in prison.
Nowadays, on social media, everything he says or does is viewed through a left-right lens, his every view on immigration or public corruption discounted by legions of progressives and independents as the mutterings of a conservative conspiracy kook.
“Charlie LeDuff, bias, worked at Fox, makes him NOT credible. His so-called opinion supports the Republican narrative,” wrote one tweeter in November 2022.
LeDuff steadfastly defends his views on all of that and insists they’re not politically motivated. He says he voted for Whitmer (at least the first time). And he says he’d pretty much appear anywhere. “Is there a show I wouldn’t do? Possibly,” he says. “Put it this way: If you’re asking me to be on to ask my opinion, that’s fine, but I’m not a ‘plug me in and whatever you want to talk about’ kind of guy.”
On this point, too, he is right. His most recent appearance with Carlson came in December after a visit to the Southern border. Some of what he said was music to Carlson — the border is a sieve, Biden’s policies are encouraging an onslaught of migration, these asylum seekers are actually just “broke people looking for a better life” — but a lot of it was probably unusual for Fox News viewers.
LeDuff made an impassioned argument about why a border wall would be useless and berated Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for failing to find a compromise solution.
“I find people like to criticize, and they do regardless,” says Karen Dumas, LeDuff’s podcast co-host and a Detroit News columnist. “People want to say, ‘Oh, because Charlie’s on their show, he must agree with everything that they stand for.’ That’s not necessarily true. To him, it’s another platform where he’s able to have a conversation, to share the work he’s doing.”
Indeed, others who may have once viewed LeDuff with suspicion or fear now are fans. When GQ journalist Devin Friedman profiled LeDuff in 2013 under the headline “Madman of the Year,” LeDuff bragged that he was responsible “for the firing of two Detroit police chiefs and a fire commissioner.”
One of those was former top cop Ralph Godbee, who lost his job over an extramarital, intraoffice sex scandal in which one woman involved gave LeDuff a salacious interview complete with smutty text messages. Godbee is now a friend and a frequent guest on LeDuff’s show to discuss law enforcement issues.
“A lot of people assume I have some animus against Charlie because of his coverage of the end of my career with the Detroit Police Department, and nothing could be farther from the truth,” says Godbee, now a minister. “You can’t fault somebody for what they report. You have to take accountability for your own actions.”
One of the progressive activists who refused to comment for this report told me he felt it would only encourage LeDuff. That struck me as a remarkably short-sighted way of looking at his work and career.
LeDuff doesn’t need to be encouraged; he’s shown time and again he’ll do whatever interests him, say whatever moves him, appear almost anywhere he’s invited. He could’ve been a New York Times lifer. Instead, in his late 50s, he’s taking advantage of the democratization of media accorded by podcasting — and he’s now got a robust audience of more than 100,000 downloads per episode and the show last year went to semiweekly.
“What’s so interesting about Charlie is that he doesn’t give a crap about how you feel about him at all,” Smith tells me. “He is just 100 percent authentically him, which I really respect. He was gonna go out there and do what he wanted to do in the style that he wanted to do it whether management liked it or not.”
And his resourcefulness seems limitless. LeDuff began working at American Coney Island as a handyman in 2017 after leaving Fox 2 because he suddenly discovered that health insurance for the self-employed is expensive. He’d made friends with the owner, Grace Keros, when he persuaded her to let him use the window booth for a regular political roundtable series he did for Fox 2.
He’s used other skills to spiff up the joint with paint, tile, new pipes. Later, after he launched his podcast in fellow media renegade Drew Lane’s basement studio in Ferndale, LeDuff discovered Keros’ unused storage attic and turned it into his studio. Whereas his renovations for the restaurant below showed he knows how to render a space clean, neat, and new, the studio he crafted is deliberately rustic with bricked-up windows, distressed paint, fluorescent lighting, and exposed wood beams.
A framed copy of the U.S. Constitution and mounted deer’s antlers hang on walls on each side of a long black desk that stands atop a busy, beaten-down area rug. There’s a short tree next to his desk; I ask why there are folded pieces of yellow paper hanging from many of its branches. Turns out, LeDuff makes guests play him in tic-tac-toe, and if he wins, he puts the game on his “Tree of Shame.” (I tie him, so my game is tossed in the bin.)
In other words, LeDuff seems eccentric and perhaps a bit unfocused, but he knows exactly what he’s up to. It’s a balance of art and artifice, and now that he’s freed himself of any media gatekeepers, there’s little to stop him.
Still, he claims he’s, actually, a sensitive soul.
“I won’t read it,” he tells me of this piece. “If you want me to, I will. But it can be the most accurate, most clever, well-written thing. And just like every other human being, when I read my Twitter feed, it’s the one asshole picking on me. So you write a sentence I don’t like, then I’m pissed. That’s why you don’t read your own press. Not to avoid getting big-headed. Because it’s useless.”
This story is part of the May 2023 issue of Hour Detroit. Read more in our Digital Edition.
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