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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. We've got a great guest today, Mr. ML Elrick. He's a renowned investigative journalist and one of those people from the proud history of journalism, the proud history of the Fourth Estate. This week we've had whistle-blowers on Capitol Hill, exposing potential corruption and retaliation inside the FBI; we have a media complex that's reporting that the FBI didn't have any problems and besides, they fixed all of them. We've seen trials by media become prevalent, and we see orchestrated, scripted question and answer sessions with those that we elect. But today [we have] a real reporter, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Emmy Award, Mr. ML Elrick. He's also the host of ML Soul of Detroit. ML, it's an honor to have you here on The Common Bridge.
ML Elrick
Thanks for having me, Rich.
Richard Helppie
Our audience likes to know a little bit about the background of our folks. So tell us what were your early years like and how did you get into journalism? What are some of the interesting things you worked on?
ML Elrick
Sure. I started my own paper in the fifth grade, did it again my last year of college, and then did a little bit of traveling after interning at the Detroit Free Press. Came back in '92, started as a reporter at the Concord Monitor in Concord, New Hampshire. Stayed there for four years to cover the 1996 presidential primary where my main candidate was Pat Buchanan; spent a year traveling around New Hampshire with Pat Buchanan as he met people and ended up pulling out an upset victory and won the New Hampshire primary over the incumbent president back in '96. Excuse me, no, not over Bush, but he was the Republican winner in the New Hampshire - first in the nation - primary. [I] went to Chicago for a couple of years and came to Detroit in 1999 as the obituary writer at the Detroit Free Press. Since then I've written a few political obituaries, including one for the former mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, who was doing 28 years in federal prison for public corruption when Donald Trump saw fit to commute his sentence. He is now out and about and trying to get more money from people. So sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Richard Helppie
Yes, and that story...about how you broke the story about Kwame Kilpatrick...of course his father, Bernard, was heavily involved with the corruption but because of where your workspace was you were able to see who was coming and going from City Hall. What was it like then and what's happened since?
ML Elrick
Sure. I'm now the On Guard columnist for the Detroit Free Press. That's a government watchdog column. About three weeks ago, I started talking about the importance of creating a media room, a press room for every reporter in Detroit to use on the 11th floor of City Hall, which is the same floor [on which] the mayor of Detroit has many of his key offices. For almost 60 years that's where reporters worked in City Hall. About 13 years ago we got banished to the basement by an advisor to then Mayor Dave Bing. Now the Free Press's lease is about to be up. There's no point in us staying in the basement, so we are preparing to relinquish that space which means there will be no reporters working out of City Hall for the first time since that building opened in the 1950s. So I brought together newsroom leaders throughout the metro area to sign a letter calling for the building authority that manages the building, for the city council and the mayor, to provide us with, if you will, a nondenominational workspace where no individual news organization has a key to the door. But anybody who's a reporter, photographer, who needs this place, a place to work in City Hall, can set up and do the people's business. So far we're waiting to hear back whether anybody's going to engage with us on this but it's extraordinary for both of the main newspapers, for the alternative media, for the TV stations, for the news radio stations, to come together on an issue that really is about competition. That is, if you have a key to the door, you've got an edge. But here, we're all saying this is so important, this is so intrinsic to what we do - informing the public - that we all want to work together to get back and maintain our space in that building.
Richard Helppie
The watchdog role of the press has been diminished and we've covered that on our program about [how] there's not a print newspaper, there's not the editorial controls and such. There's been, frankly, too close of a working relationship; we've seen it at certain levels. But it just seems to me as a citizen that I'd like a detached, honest press to be near those that are elected, and watch the comings and goings and chat with them and have a finger on the pulse. But it seems like the City pushed you in the opposite direction. And it's not just you, it's your competitors saying, well, wait a minute, we all need this access. Am I getting that right?
ML Elrick
You're absolutely right. The Free Press has held its ground for 13 years and it's getting to a point because of budgetary concerns. Frankly, because the space is not of any value to us, when our lease expires, we're preparing to move out at the end of the month. But that inspired me to turn to my colleagues and say this is an issue that's bigger than the Free Press. So while I've rounded up the support from news leaders in southeastern Michigan, I did not do that as the On Guard columnist for the Free Press. I did that as ML Elrick, reporter/journalist, someone who cares about the Fourth Estate and about informing the public. You mentioned Bernard Kilpatrick, the mayor's father; when we were on the 11th floor, we saw him coming and going all the time, we saw a contractor coming and going all the time with unfettered access to the mayor's office who was later convicted of public corruption. We saw evidence that the mayor was refurbishing his office at a time when he was cutting city services. We didn't see that because somebody gave us a tip, we didn't see that because there was a press release. We saw that because we were right there; that was on our front door. Also, when you get on the elevator, you might run into the mayor, you might run into a department head, you might be able to ask them a question that you wouldn't otherwise be able to put to them. This is the setup in government buildings around the country. It's the way it worked in the New Hampshire State House when I was there. It's the way it worked in City Hall in Chicago. It's the way it works in the federal courthouses; there are media rooms for everybody to use. Because those government agencies, the people who run those buildings, understand that it's their responsibility to provide a place for the reporters who do the interviewing and the questioning that we then return to the public - to have a space to work. I mean, this is, quite simply, a no brainer. If people don't want us there, one has to wonder why. What are they afraid we're going to see?
Richard Helppie
That's where my cynicism and skepticism would kick into high gear; you're not serving the public if you're not willing to be transparent about what you're doing. It sounds to me like all of the crimes that Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted of may not have ever been discovered absent the fact that you were there to observe the comings and goings in his office.
ML Elrick
We did find a lot of things from public records and I think we would have brought a lot of this to light. But in terms of the notion that there's a million stories you can do and you have to pick the best ones, when you see indicia that something improper is going out, that helps you make the right news decision, that helps you decide that there may be something here worth pursuing; it's not just your imagination. The other thing is some of these questions we would ask the mayor on the elevator would just be, hey, what's going on with the new police chief? What's happening with the after school program? They were not always gotcha questions. They were just conversations. One of the things that you see when the media and our elected officials and the people who have their hands on the levers of power become separated [is] there's a distance there. There's not a relationship, there's not a level of comfort, there's not a level of trust, and you just lose those opportunities for spontaneous conversations about what's going on so that when you do have a tough question to ask, it's like, I only see you when it's bad news. No, we want to see you when it's any kind of news. We want to have a healthy, robust relationship where we get to know each other so that we can leverage that relationship to inform the people - our readers, our watchers, our listeners - because that's why we spend all day in City Hall. Believe me, nobody wants to sit through a city council meeting unless they're going to bring back some information for people who don't have the opportunity to sit through a city council meeting and find out what's really going on.
Richard Helppie
We need people like you in those meetings, willing to go through the drudgery of staying there and understanding the background and the context. I can imagine if I just showed up at a city council meeting and I listened, I'd get only the surface level versus the context and who the players are and what they said before. The really interesting thing about this is you wrote a column where you talked about how competitive the news market is in Detroit, that it's really out of character for the various news gathering companies to cooperate. You actually had some great stories about stepping in front of someone [else's] long investigative story. Help our listeners, our readers, and our viewers understand how extraordinary this cooperation is, given that backdrop in this intense competition.
ML Elrick
I'll tell you another story that I haven't published. There was a time when we were investigating some of the mayor's bodyguards and we had to get a lawsuit from the archives; you have to order that. Well, we ordered it and it was waiting for us on a Friday and one of my colleagues went to go pick it up. But somebody from the other newspaper got there ahead of him, requested the file, and [they said] well it's right here, and he said, I'd like to look at it. Well, he didn't request it, it was there because I had requested it days earlier. And so when my colleague said, hey, where's the file, they said, we already gave it to another reporter. He's like, who? It was the guy in the corner from the other newspaper looking at it and he refused to hand that file over to our guy, even though we requested it. Now, at the end of the day, he did relinquish it, because we...let's just say we persuaded him, that first of all, it was the right thing to do and second of all, if he didn't do the right thing, he might suffer grievous bodily harm. But that's how competitive it is here. Now having a press room there gives the Free Press a competitive advantage but if we're going to give it up, we would like to maintain a presence in City Hall. We thought the best way to do that - or I thought the best way to do that - was to bring together other newsroom executives. We have all three TV stations in town, both the news radio stations, the alternative media, online press, The [Detroit] News and the Free Press; we've all signed this letter. Also some very important organizations such as the Detroit Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Michigan Press Association; these are people who care about journalism, first and foremost and while they're very competitive, and we do anything to beat the other guy, we understand that there are some issues that are type O blood, that we all need, that we can all use, and that is access and a seat in the corridors of power.
Richard Helppie
I think it goes beyond our southeastern Michigan corner and beyond our city of Detroit that people do thirst for real news reporting. As I've been doing this work on The Common Bridge and talking with more people, I'm getting the sense that folks just don't believe what they read. They know that if they go to some of the major cable outlets or some of the traditional - what used to be traditional - national print media, they know they're going to get a story that has key facts removed from it. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we've got a situation where the president is going to hold a press conference, but it's all orchestrated in advance; call on this person, this is the question they're going to ask you and now read this back. How dangerous is that to our democracy and our free society?
ML Elrick
Well, I think presidential press conferences have been like that forever. If anything, I would say that the value of presidential press conferences is greater now than it was back in, say, the 60s, in the 50s, when everybody was really chummy, when there really was a boys club in Washington, DC covering up Kennedy's affairs and maybe Eisenhower's health problems. Now there's a more adversarial relationship between the media and the executives. But that's led to restricted access, that's led to, as you say, very staged opportunities. That's a real problem. You know, Sam Donaldson used to yell at Ronald Reagan as he got into a helicopter because that was his only chance to ask a question. People thought that looks silly, but you kind of ask questions where you can, and when they push us out of the building we don't have a chance to ask those questions, we have to rely on those staged scripted events where everything is very carefully controlled. That's just not any good. In terms of trust, I do think there has been a lot of loss of trust in the media mainly through the national media and primarily through the cable news stations where frankly, you see more reporters sitting in a studio opining about something [rather] than speaking to you from Congress, from the White House, telling you about what they've seen and heard. It's more opinion than reporting. I don't want to get out of city hall because I want to be at the place where the things are happening. I don't want to leave city hall, go back to the newsroom where we have a set, then tell people what I saw. I want to report from the place where it's happening. I want to be there, where it's happening. And if you can't get in the door, then you've lost a lot of access and a lot of opportunity.
Richard Helppie
I think you've covered a lot of ground there. And kind of what I'm teasing out of this is that...by the way, I've been doing a lot of reading on this topic, about how the reporters - not actually reporters but they're more scribes - they're getting paid based on how many clicks and forwards and likes and such, versus that noble mission of let's get the story right and get it out there. In your career have you seen that arc change? As an outsider, for me, that's kind of what it feels like, but am I reading that right?
ML Elrick
Well, the truth is, the news business has always tried to play to the masses. I mean, newspapers and television; nobody pays for local television. What you pay to get a local newspaper is pennies on the dollar for what it costs to produce it so we've always been subsidized by advertisers. So we've always tried to provide people with content we thought they'd be interested in and that also helps sell ads. Now I'm in the news business, not the advertising business so I don't really worry about whether we're selling ads or not. But the issue is, we do things that people are interested in as a business, but also because we're trying to inform as many people as possible. When I worked at one of our local news stations, I would often come on at the top of the five o'clock news and just before I came on was “Inside Edition” or one of those tabloid shows. At that time, they ended almost every show with an update on the Anna Nicole Smith child custody battle, which I had no interest in, and which seemed to me to be just junk food. But it didn't bother me that much because I knew the people who were watching that were probably too lazy to get up and change the channel. So while they watched this garbage, in a couple of minutes they were getting in some news; it was really important. It is important to provide a product that will attract people so that when they come to see who won the lottery, or who won the Tiger game, they'll also see who voted for a tax increase, or who sold property to a developer; that they have a business relationship. That's why we have the comics, so people will come to be entertained, but you have to go through the entire paper until you get to the comics. So it's always been this way. But the formula for attracting people has become more outrage and ranting and raving. Again, that kind of goes back to journalism's roots too; yellow journalism, tabloid journalism and the police gazette: if it bleeds, it leads. There's a lot of hand wringing about whether we've sold out; the real issue is if we're selling out, we're not getting enough money to keep all these reporters, we're losing reporters. So there are few eyeballs and there are a few stories being told and that's the real problem.
Richard Helppie
You're right on with that, because the business model has been destroyed. When there was a print newspaper industry there were ads sold and those were ostensibly sold by publisher, and reporting and editorial were in separate areas. Like you said, it's not your job to sell ads, your job is to go report the news. Now we've divided into this affirmation programming of the news; you know what you're going to get when you go on MSNBC versus Fox versus CNN. You know what you're going to get when you go to the New York Times, who has made an art out of dropping certain facts out of stories and then ignoring them. I mean just this week, we had the report from Special Prosecutor John Durham and he came right out and said, the FBI and the DOJ did not live up to the fidelity of their office; and on the partisan divide, there's a whole group going, meh, doesn't matter. That, to me, is alarming. We should all be concerned about those very powerful organizations that literally could put us in jail, take our freedom, take our life; they need to be watched and held accountable. So it bothers me when you can't get just solid reporting, that people have to decide whether their particular slice of the market is going to like it or not.
ML Elrick
I draw a heavy distinction between the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC, Fox and CNN. I do think our national newspapers do adhere to the standards of journalism. I think if you read it in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, you can trust until you hear otherwise. Cable news, on the other hand, not so sure about that. One of the things you do hear from people is they still do trust their local media, their local newspaper, their local television station. That may be because they have a closer relationship with those people. That may be because they can see a lot of what's being reported on for themselves because they're in that community. But that's why, when we lose these reporters on the local level and when we lose places like our press rooms in government buildings, we run the risk of undermining the confidence in the one branch of journalism where people do tend to believe what they read.
Richard Helppie
And an adjacent story too, in the changing face of journalism, in a unanimous decision at the Supreme Court, it was held that Twitter, Facebook and Google are not liable for an Islamic state attack, and that they sidestepped commenting on section 230 and they're saying, oh, these are platforms, they're not publishers. I would imagine in your career you had to be very cautious about what you published to make sure it was true.
ML Elrick
Rich, I spent ten years working in TV. When I did an investigation, every word of that investigation was carefully parsed by myself, by a supervisor, by the news director and by lawyers. If we made a mistake, even an innocent mistake, that could lead to a fine, it could lead to an impact on our broadcast license. Most importantly, it would undermine our credibility. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube - all these publishers - they are broadcasters, they are using the public resources, they are using the broadcast spectrum. They publish people murdering people live, they publish people being raped. Where are their consequences? What's his name, Justin Timberlake, removed a brassiere from Janet Jackson and CBS was vilified and fined and punished. I didn't really think that was an appropriate thing to see on my prime-time television broadcast but that's nothing compared to what's published every day on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And those platforms, if you will, make so much money, they actually have the resources to preview everything that's going to be broadcast. So far, all we've heard is Mark Zuckerberg say AI is going to save us. Well, it doesn't seem like it has so far, and I don't think it ever will. The other thing is, they're parasites. They take our work, they put it out there, they don't pay for it, they don't kick anything back to the creators and they make billions of dollars. And they say they're not responsible...I mean...
Richard Helppie
Then the reverse of that is [also] true. They've throttle stories they don't like and ones that are not following the “then” conventional wisdom. We went through a pandemic and it was something new - it was a new novel Coronavirus, right, new - but there were theories put out like this is an absolute fact. And the policy responses, you couldn't debate the policy responses. That to me, the flip side, not only putting everything out, but throttling. We have the administration saying they want to have a an office to fight disinformation and when we start getting into things like our government saying what the truth is, that doesn't seem to be their role. So in this climate, how do we get back to, or go forward to, a place of reporting integrity, where a reporter can earn a living and still practice their craft with integrity?
ML Elrick
This is going to sound very self-serving so I'll make that disclaimer at the beginning, but you need to support your local media. Our business model has shifted from being subsidized by advertisers to being paid for by users. When I was in college 35 years ago, we were told that ten percent of the cost of producing a newspaper was covered by newsstand sales and subscriptions. It was mainly [supported by] classified advertising, display advertising and whatever else they had. Now it's subscriptions. Now more than 50% of the revenue that newspapers like the Free Press get are coming from subscribers. That ,to me, is really important because it means that people are paying for something they value. It also means that if you betray that audience, they have the power to tell you we've had enough. You have to maintain that trust with your audience. But I also think people have been led to believe that all the best things in life are free. Well, there's a lot of crap on TV that is paid for by slip and fall attorneys. There's a lot of garbage on the internet that's paid for by advertisers who are trying to target you and your children, and the internet is free. Now, I think it's time that we put a price on quality, that we say that there's a value to something and when there's a value to something, we have to pay something for it. It's a nominal price. But in the meantime, we need to hold the line. We need to maintain our workspace and government buildings, we need to try and keep as many reporters as we can employed to be watchdogs. I've started an investigative reporting program for students based in East Lansing, where we raise money and we train students to do watchdog journalism. We're going to have our first story coming out later this summer. That's an innovative way to do this. It's raised with private funds. At some point, we'll probably ask nonprofits and foundations to write us grants. But you are seeing things where journalism has become both a nonprofit and truly a mission where yes, there's still the for profit media companies but then there are things like what I'm doing. There are things like ProPublica, there's The Marshall Project that looks at criminal justice; where people have understood that we need to create a market for this and we need to have people who know what they're doing, doing it; so they can support their families and so they can help bring along the next generation of Pulitzer Prize winners who are going to help put the next crooked mayors in prison.
Richard Helppie
Very well said. I know Substack and others have begun that direct to consumer model that reporters and editorialists frankly, are saying, look, if you want to support me, you can; that's where we put this program. ML, where do people find your work? How do they go about finding your work today?
ML Elrick
If you go to freep.com most of my work is subscriber only, some of the content we publish is free but my stuff tends to be behind the paywall. Right now I think it's $9.99 for a year's subscription and if you hit the right button, I think you get a $5 Amazon gift card, so it's pretty cheap. Then my podcast, “ML Soul of Detroit,” you can find that at MLSoulDetroit.com or anywhere you find podcasts. Like The Common Bridge, our mission is to take people behind the scenes and explain to them what's really going on in politics and also to demystify investigative reporting. When I worked for Fox2 we would talk about things like how do you stake somebody out? How do you sit in a car for 12 hours without having to go to the bathroom? Why do you have to sit in a car for 12 hours? Do you go up to somebody and ask them questions when they're with their children? The answer is no. You try and find them another time. To get out of a car at five in the morning in Detroit, when it's dark out, and run up to somebody to ask them a question, no, you say that's when people get shot. So we explain that, mainly because we want people to understand not only what we do, but why we do it and how we do it. Because if journalism becomes like magic or like a card trick, then it creates fear, it creates skepticism, it creates doubt. If I saw a woman in half, that's a dead woman. I'm going to show you how the saw goes in; we don't do magic. We want you to understand what the process is like and also why we're doing it. One of my colleagues many years ago at Channel 4 told me something that I've never forgotten - that I tell all my students and my colleagues - the most important word in every story is "you." Not me, not Rich, but you the reader, the listener, the viewer, because we need to make you understand how it affects you. When government wastes money, when government won't answer your questions, how does it affect you; that's money they could have spent on a program that you care about. They don't want to answer a question because they're afraid their truthful answer will alienate you so you won't vote for them or donate to them. Unless we're making people understand the “you” in every story, we're not really doing our job. For me, this is a passion, this is a profession, but it really is about trying to inform you what's going on because you deserve to know; I deserve to be compensated for doing that but you deserve to know what's going on in government because you pay for that every day when you pay your taxes.
Richard Helppie
Absolutely. I love hearing your passion and your commitment and your professionalism to keep this going. We had a professor from Texas Christian University, Dr. Richard Enos, who talked about the parallels between our society and societies in antiquity. I didn't know this when I interviewed him, but he also used to teach courses in propaganda. That's the other part that I think where we're on the slippery slope; if people start looking at the national news, or even local news as well, and we know that's not the full story, we've lost our society. This is where I like what you're saying; I'm very encouraged about the idea of let's have a nonprofit that can actually do investigative reporting, that we're going to have reporters go in unfettered and unaligned with any outcome - just get the facts and tell us what it is - versus start with a narrative and plug in all the facts. I know, in years past when I was in business or in some of our philanthropic work, I'd be interviewed, I always watched for that gotcha question. I could tell they had written the article and they wanted a quote. It didn't work 100% of the time, but I would say, well, tell me what you've written so far so that I can kind of understand where you're going with this because they were looking for a quote, kind of a gotcha question at the end, to put a particular slant on it. I'm just really encouraged by you and what you're doing and if there are things we can do on this Common Bridge to let people know about it, bring more folks to you, and more subscribers; to your point, ten dollars a year for the Detroit Free Press - more than worth it. I mean, that's, I don't know, a couple of lattes maybe and a pack of cigarettes or something these days. It's much more important to get reporters on the street that are going to be close to those we elect, that are also behind government looking at who dumped that waste in that field over there, how did that person get this contract to continue to build apartments and condominiums although they're leaving in their wake very poor construction quality, and such. Those are real things that, to your point, affect the audience members. Today, I hear too much discussion...kind of a narrative to make people angry. My personal experience is we're not that angry of people. The news complex is angry, the political complex is angry but most people are pretty good. We're a country filled with compassionate and generous people that want to do the right thing and I think some of your work will help us do that.
ML Elrick
Well, I appreciate that. Our project is called Eye on Michigan. I'll let you know how people can support that when we get this first story up. But very much like the press room initiative when we produce an investigation, it'll be made available first to the Free Press and The State News, which is our host organization in East Lansing. They provide some subsidy, a very small, small grant and office space. But once they have the right to publish it, it will be made available to every media outlet in Michigan - print, radio, broadcast, online - because we want this to get to everybody. We don't want only subscribers to this outlet or viewers of this station to get it. Certainly we have our partners, but once they've had the opportunity to share it, then we want everybody to do it because small news organizations just can't afford to conduct their own investigative reporting. It's very expensive. When a reporter disappears for six months to do a project, like a bad builder who's leaving contamination or building sub-safety housing, a small newspaper in six months, your typical reporter is probably going to write two to three stories a day so that's 10 to 15 stories a week over six months; you just can't sacrifice hundreds of stories for one story. But we can provide you something that will be a value to your community. They will help you understand that something isn't right and then you can decide what you want to do with it. If you don't care, no problem. But if you don't know, you can't decide what you're going to do.
Richard Helppie
I think that's very well said. I think it'll be interesting as you release this first story, not only who picks it up, but who ignores it. Two recent examples. We had major news organizations - plural - that said, hey, our audience is going to like the idea that the voting machines were tampered with so we're going to run that. We don't think it's true, but we're going to run it because our audience is going to like it. Similarly, on the other side, there was a completely false story about a hospital in Oklahoma overwhelmed with people overdosing on Ivermectin that went viral through Associated Press, NPR and other places, because they liked the story, because it was playing to their narrative. So it's going to be really interesting when you release some real investigative reporting - no cost - who picks it up and who ignores it. I'll be fascinated to read about that.
ML Elrick
Well, right. Now, the other fascinating thing is, how many of the people we are trying to ask about their conduct don't want to respond. In my mind, when an elected official, a public official, won't answer questions that's a betrayal of the public trust right there. (Richard Helppie: Yeah, absolutely.) Answers. Just tell us the truth, unless you're afraid of the truth, in which case, you probably shouldn't be in that job.
Richard Helppie
Right, and with the proviso that they are made to understand that we're going to sit down and give you a full hearing versus we're here to ambush you to get a 30 second soundbite to build our narrative. I know that I've had several guests on this show that have said this [show] is a relief because they get time to explain the nuances versus how does this 30 second soundbite going to sound going around the airwaves; we've seen people taken out of their jobs and pilloried and losing their credentials based on a flip statement. We need to cut some folks some slack and understand the nuances.
ML Elrick
Sure. When I was a TV reporter, a lot of people didn't want to talk to me, mainly because they didn't like what their explanation was going to be. But I would always call and ask for an appointment to sit down with them at a time and place that was convenient to them. Sometimes people took me up on it, often they didn't, and then I would have to go get them. That's when you spend ten hours in a car hoping you don't wet your pants. Then you do end up with just soundbites but they were always given the opportunity to have a conversation like we're having. When I would run my stories, you would see me call and say, hey, I'd like to come and talk to you, and if they wouldn't, then we'd have to go get them. One thing that I do think social media has done for people now is if you are caught in one of those 30 second soundbite things, you can go to your own channel, your own Facebook page, your own Twitter feed, what have you, and tell your whole story. If they got your 30 seconds running down the street, you can sit in front of a camera and give a half an hour treatise on what the full story is. There is more of an opportunity now for people to get their complete side out if they feel like they've been taken out of context. But the bottom line is, if you know what you're doing and you have a good explanation, you should be able to tell us in a minute or two why you did what you did.
Richard Helppie
More frequently, though, what we see is people just attacking the messenger, like they were caught in a compromising situation - dead to rights - but they go, well, that's coming on Fox News, that's coming on MSNBC...well, is it true or not true? I mean, that's all I want to know, I don't really care who's reporting it; is it true? So that is another thing that we've fallen into. It's not what the facts are and what's being said, but who's saying it. So we have a large part of America that says, we're not going to listen to anything these guys over here say, and we have the other side saying the same thing. That really is the essence of The Common Bridge; trying to get us to talk to each other. A long conversation would be Donald Trump's role in that; at what point he came into the game and what he's done to exacerbate that situation. But we can't have calm conversations where we can deal with facts anymore. It just seems that's really difficult.
ML Elrick
And COVID, you mentioned a little while ago, is a perfect example of how things can go wrong. Virtually no one alive had any context for this because the closest thing we had was 1918. So if you were alive, you were a child, you really don't have much to add to the discussion. But there was a lot of reporting that I think probably should have been more carefully presented in terms of this is what we believe based on what we know, this is what we think, this is what people believe, as opposed to this is the deal; because they didn't know the deal and some things turned out to be true and some things turned out to be wrong. There were some people who honestly and earnestly reported what they thought to be true, who were proven over time to be wrong. It didn't mean they set out to hoodwink people; it does mean that at certain points you should just say, hey, listen, folks, we're having a conversation here. We don't know if it's best that you don't wear a mask, initially, maybe you should just to be safe. We don't know whether you don't need an N95 mask, well, the truth is, you probably should wear one, but we can't spare them. I'm sorry, those are just the facts. I think when you start from a open and fair-minded conversation, where you disclose what you don't know as much as what you do know, people can come back to you and say, that was the guy who told me to put on a mask but he also told me he wasn't sure or that's the guy who said masks might not help you but he said, if you want to be safe, it can't hurt you. Then you develop that relationship where people can say this is somebody who presented me some information for me to decide - again, for you to decide - instead of you've got to do this.
Richard Helppie
Well, look, I live in Ann Arbor and there are people that are still wearing masks outside by themselves and we'll be doing that 20 years from now because it's like a badge. It's a virtue badge. I think your point is right on, what we knew and what we didn't know. So on this show, we had Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Harvard Medical, who - along with professors from Stanford Medical and Oxford - authored something called the Great Barrington Declaration, early on in the pandemic. It said, look, we're violating every principle of public health with the lockdowns and only focusing on one thing; we don't need to close schools. He was taken off - all of them were taken off - Twitter and Facebook. There are emails from the CDC saying we need to shut these guys down. They [Kulldorff and colleagues] of course, turned out to be correct, so they did have that perspective. James Baker from Michigan Medicine - who has an army background with using biological warfare, as well as having run the vaccine program for Merck for ten years - talked about what the new vaccines do and how they're supposed to work. He was able to give real information versus if you went to one side of the established news media, [where] it was, hey, these shots are effective and without risk. Well, we don't know because we haven't tested them enough; but that's what they said. The other side said, oh, no, don't touch them because they're going to damage you. But we never heard from guys like Dr. Baker, Dr. Kulldorff. And Dr. Baker, to your point about this was a new virus, he said in 1918...that guy's an immunologist, he studied the Spanish flu. In 1918, he said we knew it was over because people quit dying. Yet, with COVID we kept screening people; guess what, it's still out there. Are you sick? Man, I don't feel that bad. But you've got it. Right. We just didn't know what to do with that information. So I think COVID is a great example of something that affects everybody, that we could have done a lot better job reporting around and a lot better job to make it a non-political issue.
ML Elrick
I hope it doesn't happen again, because I like to learn from mistakes. But I hope that we don't have to put that knowledge to use anytime soon.
Richard Helppie
Right, exactly. We want the next one to say, hey, the last time this happened was 100 years ago in 2020 - we won't be here to experience that. ML, this has been a fantastic conversation. As we move to the close is there anything we didn't talk about that you'd like to cover for our listeners, readers and viewers?
ML Elrick
I think it's just important to know that most reporters are trying to get you the story. We don't always have access to all the information we need to give you the full story. We do our best to tell you as much as we can confirm by the time our deadline comes around. I often am faulted for, why aren't you reporting on this and why haven't you done anything on that? First of all, well, how do you know I'm not working on it and second of all, how do you know I haven't investigated and found out it wasn't true? I don't go on the news or publish something that says somebody told me some crap that I looked into that turned out not to be true. Now, here's the weather, a lot of assumptions being made; I think if we can just give everybody the benefit of the doubt, which I think good reporters do. I often don't contact people until I think I know what the story is. So it may feel like the story is pre-written but it really is just that I'm not going to bother you or ask you something you may find offensive unless I'm pretty sure that there's something there. But my rule is: I always let the facts get in the way of a good story. People think there was a party at the mayor's mansion, there wasn't so I've never reported it even though it'd be the best story I've ever reported. I'm always willing to abandon months and months and months of work if you convince me that we're wrong. You have to work twice as hard to disprove something as you work to prove it because if you're wrong, the consequences for the people involved are devastating. They're also devastating to your own reputation. You just have to let the facts - as many as you can corral at the time - dictate what you report. And people who don't do that, well, we'll let them beat the rest of us; but at the Free Press we'd love to be first but we prefer to be right.
Richard Helppie
And on that note, I think that's a great place to wrap this up. We've been talking to ML Elrick, a renowned investigative journalist with the Detroit Free Press, please look him up: freep.com, at ML Soul of Detroit podcast. He has won the Pulitzer and the Emmy Awards. You can tell his integrity and his passion from this discussion today. ML, you're welcome back on The Common Bridge anytime, it's been an honor and a privilege to speak with you.
ML Elrick
Thanks, Rich, and hopefully we'll bring the kids from Eye on Michigan back and they can tell you what they've been doing.
Richard Helppie
We'd love to give them this channel to talk about their work. So with our guest, Mr. ML Elrick, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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