The Michigan media is Jocelyn Benson’s running mate in the 2026 governor’s race.
The campaign is off to a bad start—for both of them. Not only is the empress not wearing any clothes, but the people telling you about her beautiful robes are all blind. This is the state of the Michigan media in 2025.
Forget the George Takei Facebook post where he says Benson is running for governor in Minnesota. Forget the dirty delete on her campaign launch announcement. You can write those off as the jitters. Getting the poison out.
What stands out is how ineffective the media is as Benson’s partner.
The Detroit News managed the Benson rollout. Craig Mauger’s story is not even an attempt at journalism. It’s a bad version of what Benson’s own media office might publish.
The story reads: “In an interview with The Detroit News, Benson said she wants to be known as “the governor who puts transparency and efficiency at the forefront.”
Mauger scores an interview with the Secretary of State, who is running for governor, and somehow never asks the obvious questions. Questions like:
Hey, Jocelyn, a Chinese national voted in November, what can we do to prevent this?
Or: Hey Jocelyn, you’ll be overseeing a governor’s race you’re running in, isn’t that a conflict of interest?
Any person of moderate intelligence who reads the news sometimes would think to ask those questions. I see people ask them on Twitter all the time.
Yet when stage managing the Jocelyn Benson rollout, the Detroit News somehow missed it. Whoops.
Mauger continues: “Benson is officially starting her bid for Michigan’s top political office on the 52nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which had protected access to abortion nationally, until it was overturned on June 24, 2022. Benson vowed to be a governor who supports abortion rights.”
Mauger mentions the date Roe was overturned, but fails to mention that in November 2022, just five months later, the people of Michigan approved limitless abortion.
Benson’s timing and Mauger’s writing both further the narrative that abortion is on the ballot in 2026. It isn’t.
I would expect a flagship paper to deal in facts, not narratives. And that’s what might have happened years ago, before the Detroit News Lansing bureau rebranded as a Democrat press office.
If the Detroit News story on Benson was bad, the TV news versions were even worse.
WXYZ’s Mike Duffy could barely mask his admiration as he asked Benson about doing a marathon while eight months pregnant.
Duffy’s furrowed brow was supposed to hint at some seriousness of thought. But all I see is bad acting.
On Channel 4 in Detroit, Jason Colthorp’s interview with Benson looks more like an in-kind donation than an interview. Take a look:
The mood lighting and the exposed brick made our Detroit NBC affiliate look like a Public Access Channel. The quality of the journalism and the quality of production were far below standard for the Detroit media market.
In all three cases, the journalist was so happy to get the Benson interview that they forgot the purpose of an interview: To tell us—we the people—things we don’t know.
If you wear a media badge in Michigan, stop doing advocacy work. You’re not any damn good at it. These people all have PR teams. Get back to the basics of journalism.
Ask the questions your neighbors would ask—the questions left unanswered by your puff pieces.
Basically, you should Make Journalism Journalism Again. What you guys are doing looks more like PR for Dummies. It’s a disgrace to two fields, journalism and PR.
In print and on the airwaves, the Michigan media has decided to join the Jocelyn Benson campaign. They think we can’t see it, or don’t know what we’re looking at, but we do. Their bias is not written in invisible ink. In fact, it glows in the dark.
They’re all in it together, the way Thelma and Louise were in it together. When the crash comes, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
