Journalism is dying because journalists don’t tell true stories.
Exhibit A came Thursday from The Detroit News: “Transgender claim shadows Ann Arbor girls’ volleyball team.” The story is about the girls volleyball team at Ann Arbor Skyline High School, which has a male player.
To call this a “transgender claim,” as reporter Jennifer Chambers did, is to cast that claim into doubt, without evidence. On X, another Detroit News staffer, Chad Livengood, said “the evidence is as clear as mud.”
But it was the Detroit News report that muddied the waters, or attempted to.
Nobody else is one inch confused about what was happening at Ann Arbor Skyline. But after reading its story, a Detroit News reader might be.
Chambers spills hundreds of words on the story without ever answering the “transgender claim” cited in the headline: Is there a boy playing on the girls volleyball team, or not?
This is the closest it comes to trying: “The rumors, meanwhile, have remained just that.”
It yada-yadas past the reporter saying he has documentation of a name change.
On its face, this story presents as a search for truth. On the page, the story was written to sling arrows at Outkick reporter Dan Zaksheske, the competitor who actually broke the news and has been on the story since September.
Zaksheke has handled a controversial issue with sensitivity. He’s gone out of his way to avoid naming or shaming the boy involved, and focuses entirely on the adults who allowed him to play.
Because Zaksheke is writing about minors, he has not approached the student or his family for an interview.
Chambers flips that around into a negative, all but accusing the Outkick reporter of journalistic malpractice.
“Zaksheske told The News he has never attempted to reach or interview the athlete or the athlete’s parents,” Chambers wrote. “Outkick has never named the athlete or shown specific photos or videos.”
But Chambers never attempts to reach the student either, and her story shows no evidence of trying to reach his family.
Chambers allows anonymous online commenters to frame Zaksheke as a creep for daring to care about the same newsworthy story she is writing about.
This is what the reporter thinks, but cannot say herself. So she uses anons to make her point.
“Some critics have expressed outrage online at Zaksheske’s coverage, accusing him of harassing minors,” Chambers wrote. “After he posted on X Tuesday that ‘the season has come to an end,’ one commenter fired back: “Your coverage was savagery disguised as journalism — it was high school sports and kids’ lives for god’s sake. Happy hunting, beast.”
Chambers quotes a second anon as saying “what will you do with your time now that you don’t have a minor to stalk and harass?”
If covering high school sports is “stalking and harassing minors,” what is Chambers doing? What did Mick McCabe do at the Detroit Free Press for 55 years? What does David Goricki do at the Detroit News?
We never get answers because Chambers did not interview the anon commenters, she just quoted them. Which is fine for an opinion piece. But the Detroit News purports to be writing news.
For a short time in 2023 and 2024, I was a Detroit News columnist. Any time I wrote media criticism in my column, it was sent back for changes.
Editor and publisher Gary Miles famously does not like media criticism. If the publisher can find time to edit columns at the line-item level, where is that attention to detail for prominent news stories?
Miles’s distaste for media criticism makes Chambers’ story all the more puzzling. The story was not meant to provide clarity on the “transgender claim,” as it makes no attempt to do so. It was written to attack Outkick.
On X, Zaksheke told me that Chambers asked why he didn’t reach the student or his parents, which he explained in detail. That didn’t make it to the story, but two insulting anons did.
News is supposed to tell you things you don’t know. All we learned here is that Jennifer Chambers thinks Dan Zaksheke is a meanie for doing his job, and for leading on a story that the Michigan media has avoided.
That’s not fit for print. Naturally, it made the front page.
The Detroit News used to tell true and timely stories. It should get back to that.
James David Dickson is a Detroit News alum and enjoyer of Michigan. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
