Pop quiz: In a major swing state, the Democratic mayor of a Democratic city—and a Muslim—endorses Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race. Is this news?
If you said yes, congrats. You’re in alignment with the New York Post. You share news judgment with editors in India, who knew it was news. Over in Israel, they also knew it was news.
Here in Michigan, they weren’t quite sure.
Over the weekend, Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib endorsed Trump. The story soon traveled the world. But not in Detroit.
By Monday morning, Matt Wilk of Northville asked the question publicly: Why aren’t Michigan’s flagship papers, the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, covering this story?
In response, Chad Livengood, political editor of The News, made an admission that should be embarrassing: He hadn’t even seen the endorsement. Mr. Politics didn’t know nothing about nothing.
By text, tweet, email, smoke signal, and his scan of the day’s news, the political editor at Michigan’s top newspaper somehow managed to miss a story everybody else had seen.
When the story finally did get on his radar, through the hounding of Wilk and others, Livengood actually tried to defend the miss. The News doesn’t write about many individual endorsements, he said.
That was an obvious lie, easily disproved by the briefest of Google searches.
When Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris, it’s newsworthy to the Detroit News. When the cast of Scandal stumps for Harris, it’s newsworthy in the Detroit News. But when man bites dog in Hamtramck, when a Muslim Democrat supports Donald Trump, it’s not newsworthy?
Eventually, somebody with news judgment weighed in. It took many hours, but in time the Detroit News and Free Press did post stories on the Ghalib endorsement. When Louis Aguilar wrote the Detroit News version, he dug up an old social media post where Ghalib said Saddam Hussein, the late dictator of Iraq, had “the soul of a martyr.”
The goal here was not to shed light on Saddam Hussein, but to throw shade on Ghalib. Yes, he endorsed Trump, the anecdote is meant to convey, but he also said these other crazy things, so you should discount him. I liked it better when it took some work to see the thing behind the thing.
This is where we are in 2024: It takes public shaming to get our flagship papers to return to the news business, even briefly. And even then they did it under protest, and in promotion of a narrative.
This is the most important election of our lives. Everybody says so. It’s a star-making opportunity, and our flagship papers couldn’t be less interested. They wait on tarmacs for candidates to arrive. They stand in press scrums and deliver the same story as everybody else. Ten million Michiganders are craving news, and instead they’re given coverage. We want truth, and we’re given propaganda.
The Detroit News made its promise of telling timely, true stories back in 1873, before men drove roads or planes flew skies, James Scripps had the ambition to cover Detroit better than anyone. Scripps would have seen the news value of the endorsement, once you told him what Hamtramck was.
Scripps wanted his rag to be an essential member of the community. A town crier, in print. Indispensable.
Today, his heirs in journalism have dropped the baton. They’re in the business of self-service, not public service. They’ve never mattered less. It’s a real shame.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
