Joe Klein - Wrong

Every once in a while, someone will write something that calls into question his or her credibility as a reporter. Joe Klein had such a moment with a September 16 blog entry that Time headlined "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit."

The article was drawn from a conversation with ten people he met in a restaurant in Brighton, described as a Detroit exurb, 40 miles from the city.

The Detroit metropolitan area is usually considered to include the city and Wayne County, along with Macomb County to the north, used by political reporters to represent auto workers, and Oakland County to the northwest, home of the more affluent.

Brighton’s in Livingston County.

When Michigan was settled, people moved to the best lands for farming. Roads and railroads followed, and with them more economic development. The state had been covered by glaciers that left moraines and swamps. Places like Livingston County were avoided as too rocky or wet.

It’s more representative of the under developed areas that exist between major metropolitan areas. It lies on the road from Detroit to Lansing, the capital and home of Oldsmobile. Similar land lies between Detroit and Flint to the north, between Detroit and Toledo to the south, and Detroit and Battle Creek to the west.

Bad lands have always nurtured malcontents. Livingston County was the home of Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern militia movement thrives in Livingston County along with Lenawee County to the south and Jackson County to the west.

The opinions of people from such areas are important to understand, but they should not be considered representative of places like Detroit suffering from deindustrialization. They are from areas that never accepted large factories, even when they had them.

Not only were Klein’s sources not from the Detroit geographic area, only one was associated with industry: John McGraw, described as "the former president of a small division of a power-tool company that was closed down by its European owners." He lives in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and was not at the meeting in Brighton. Klein met him separately.

The rest were "cops, firefighters, emergency responders and a few lawyers." These people could be found in any small town, suburb or city in the country. They represent the middling class in nineteenth century small town life displaced by factory towns. Even when they live in large cities, they do not inhabit the industrial world signified by the word "Detroit."

Klein was traveling cross country to learn more about the roots of the Tea Party anger. The success of his trip depended on the quality of the people who arranged his interviews. This one was done by Kevin Gentry, a "deputy fire chief and adjunct law professor at Michigan State" who practices law in Brighton.

The problem with Klein’s piece isn’t the sources or what he reports; it’s the context he provides, the repetition of the word Detroit in the first two paragraphs. The comments may well represent the views of people in Detroit or the auto industry, but they are not part of world he visited, and Klein doesn’t provide any quotes from such people to confirm that their experiences are shared.

Indeed, the only people he quoted were the former executive, a lawyer and a deputy police chief. If any of the people he met were commoners, or if any of them had opinions, we don’t know what they were. If they had differing views, they may not have expressed them in this gathering.

It was the job of Klein, or the people prepping him for these interviews, to learn more about the sociology of the area he was visiting.

The unwary reader could finish the article with a wrong impression.

For those like me, who grew up in areas that bordered one of the badlands or lived near Brighton for several years, the failure to know simple facts about the community is the failure that plants a seed of doubt about Klein’s reliability.

One may dismiss this as quibbling over details, but details are the very thing we use to judge reporters.

Notes: An Anti-Defamation League website lists events sponsored in 2010 by the Lenawee Militia, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia in Brighton, and a neo-Nazi group, Battalion 14, in Jackson.