Life for journalists is often an exercise in sage like patience. Any good journo whose opinions are worth a damn already know that the best story often emerges as a "slow burn". Curiosity piques , research produces embers of agency, and the smoke of a story begins slowly.
To keep the flame of public interest alight, journalists must do what they can to continue feeding it until conflagration appears. Follow up pieces often act as logs and kindling for the public's fire. It's only at this stage that journalists will reach out to each other to spread the burning inferno of public inquiry as widely as possible so that the flames consume dry landscape of public awareness. Once everything is engulfed in this fire that the seeds of change are spread and the public does it's best to carry the seeds of new stories along and plant them for future conflagrations to appear.
There are, however, certain fires journalists attempt to squelch before unwanted sources of heat and smoke are captured by the public and transformed into an unwanted blaze.
In this city, the flame that is trying to be extinguished as we speak by our local class of professional journalists is the prospect of a Radical candidate winning the Detroit mayoral election and kickstarting the creation of a Radical-led Metropolitan Government.
This proposed chain reaction will be expanded upon in the near future, however, in the meantime, we have to examine who is trying to play down the possibility of a Detroit mayor being made of a different caliber than all of the city's previous leaders in it's modern history.
Before this publication starts "naming and shaming", it must be said that the journalist in question participating in this behavior is well respected by the author of this publication because of his coverage of the Kilpatrick administration in the past. And there is no ill will being displayed by this critique. It is hoped that this article serves as a bit of constructive criticism from a fellow writer and admirer.
With that being said, the journalist in question and the subject of this report is M. L. Elrick, longtime reporter and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
Our focus will be on his comments on the MICHMASH podcast produced by WDET Detroit (which is the local NPR station for those not familiar) in which he gave his analysis of the slow running Detroit mayor's race. Seeing as this race is poised to remain the biggest story of the year, a Radical's take on Elrick's comments is necessary to broadcast to other Radicals.
Despite Elrick's extensive time as a reporter, his comments vividly illustrate Black Label Detroit's, editorial position regarding the hidden role of media in Metro Detroit. Here's a quote:
"Their editorial slants serve as a specific type of means to the neoliberal politician's desired ends. Especially for people such as Mike Duggan. Since it's the job of the politician to respond to public opinion, and it's the job of the journalist to shape that same public opinion, when those two social forces decide to achieve some sorta "special relationship" with each other, they have the effect of shaping (or, in our case, shortening) the horizons of our collective futures."
This "consensus molding" feature of journalism is laid bare within the video and are blatantly implicit based on what the hosts Cheyna Roth and Zack Gorchov asked to how Elrick responded to them in the video. Let's analyze them in no particular order:
"Is this a change election, or is Duggan so popular that [they'll keep the status quo]?"
"[...] Mary Sheffield who cast herself as a populist has gone out of
her way to praise Duggan and say we're gonna build on what
Duggan brought. It is not going to be that's enough of Mike Duggan
we need change, it'll be I helped Mike Duggan do this"
(I find this response to be out of touch with politics as it exists today. Incumbent politicians have been overthrown left and right on the global scale due to inflation, there's absolutely no indication that municipal politics will be any different)
"Do you think that there'll be a swing to the Left in the Mayor's office like there was in Chicago with Lori Lightfoot?"
" No, I don't think you'll see a Radical/Progressive you'd see in a
Jill Stein type of way, we won't see the guy in New York saying
the rent is too damn high. We will have someone who the business
community is comfortable with. The grassroots money that's available
is small, you're gonna see the establishment fund these candidates.
Mary Sheffield is gonna try to reassure Dan Gilbert (etc.) that while
she's gonna look out for the little guy, the big guy doesn't have to worry
about her
(the framing of this question and Elrick's answer are both deficient here, first off Chicago's Lori Lightfoot was not a radical, she had so many institutions behind her initial election victory, Besides that, they're tying being "Progressive" with being unpopular light Lightfoot and her successor Brandon Johnson are. Jumping back to Elrick's response, It would make sense strategically to come out with radical policies no matter how many candidates come forward, if all the "serious"/"realistic" candidates are all Dugganites then why would someone who wants to break from the moulid be a turn off for voters?)
"Where you surprised when Duggan chose not to run [for mayor] again?
"I wasn't surprised at all, instead, I was surprised that he chose to run for
governor as an independent"
(Finally, we see this response as an indicator that Elrick's political street smarts may be a bit rusty. It makes total sense for Duggan to run as an independent if he's expecting a massive political shift that harms establishment Dems in the short term, not to mention Governor Whitmer couldn't keep Michigan blue for Kamala Harris. It is a ballsy bit of triangulation, but he may have just secured himself the Governor's mansion in 2026)
With this analysis in mind, it's painfully obvious that our local class of established journalists don't have our ability to imagine a city in the near future run by Radicals and have that said government meet the essential needs of the citizens.
Again, this publication has nothing against M. L. Elrick or him having a mind of his own, the only thing that would be advised to journalists in his predicament is to allow yourself to accept that politics is a drastically changed field. Our journalists have to change with it.
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