Metro Times: News Blawg

Goodbye, Connie Calloway

With their latest posturing at a hearing before State Superintendent Mike Flanagan, the so-called leaders of Detroit Public Schools are shamelessly wasting what little face the district still has. There are a couple issues. First the district doesn’t want a financial manager that the state wants to install. And the district wants a trial-like hearing to challenge the decision to mandate the manager. As usual, the students, who will suffer the most, are lacking any consideration in any of this.

Let’s review: The school board chose Superintendent Connie Calloway in March 2007 from a pool of candidates that could be charitably described as weak. Calloway led a 5,700-student district in Missouri, a far cry from the Detroit situation’s finances, administration and certainly the polit ...

Homers lose one

Because of my total ineptitude at anything athletic, it still gets a laugh out of people when I tell them that my first job in journalism was covering high school sports for a small daily paper. It was at that paper that I first heard the term “homer,” which my editor used to describe a fellow sports reporter working for the competition. It’s a derisive term for the kind of writer who strives to portray the local team in the best possible light no matter what the reality. Don’t want to piss off all those moms and dads by saying junior’s team lost because it really, really sucks. Just say there was an unlucky bounce here and there and you save yourself from a lot of angry calls and abusive letters and snide remarks at the grocery store. I thought about that while reading an editorial ...

Fired up on the gun beat

As Slate’s Jack Shafer noted last month, everybody is doing the “Barack Obama election=surge in gun sales” story. AP, Globe and Mail, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star and Anchorage Daily News were on his partial list. Detroit’s own Freep followed on Nov. 23, 10 days after Shafer’s piece, with Korie Wilkins’ “Election spurs gun sale boom; owners worry Obama will increase restrictions.”

The story followed the national script with recent stats from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Oakland, for instance, recorded 769 concealed weapons permits in October 2008 compared with 328 in October 2007.

Obama backs, as Wilkins quotes from the Obama website, “comm ...

Charged

About two dozen supporters accompanied Michigan Citizen Reporter Diane Bukowski to her arraignment today in 36th District Court in Detroit, where the long-time reporter said she plans a “vigorous defense” against charges she interfered at the scene of a fatal traffic accident that followed a police chase.

Michigan State Police arrested Bukowski on Election Day (read more details here).

She says she was not interfering with their work and that police erased pictures on her digital camera that she’d taken at accident scene.

At her arraignment, Bukowski’s attorney, John Royal, waived the maximum 14 days between arraignment and preliminary exam, saying they plan to interview several w ...

Source of protection

RENO, Nev. — With a second order from a federal judge for Detroit Free Press reporter David Ashenfelter to submit to a deposition, editor Paul Anger said this week the newspaper is fighting against it “tooth and nail.”

Former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino wants to ask Ashenfelter about a source who told the 26-year Freeper about an internal Justice Department investigation into the attorney’s work.

Convertino had successfully prosecuted the country’s first post-9/11 terrorism trial in mid-2003 — a suspected “sleeper cell” operating out of a southwest Detroit apartment. But in December of that year, U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen ordered a review of the court file after learning documents the prosecution had were not turned ove ...

Text, lies and videotape

Detroit Free Press editor speaks nationally about Kilpatrick case, coverage

RENO, Nev. — Public corruption that cost taxpayers millions of dollars, courtroom drama and human tragedy all added up to one helluva story for the Detroit Free Press this year, and the paper’s editor is telling it himself to national audiences.
Free Press editor Paul Anger appeared here this week to speak to judges, journalists and court officials about the scandal, saying the paper took no pleasure in chronicling the downfall of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Barack Obama campaign to those who simply voted. And we’re still coming to grips with what it all: fearful that it will dissipate, or that the new administration will disappoint; hopeful that the promise of his campaign can be substantially fulfilled.

I keep turning to a story recounted by a good friend who campaigned in Jacksonville, Fla., traditionally a red patch in a red state. The early voting had already begun when she was canvassing in a racially mixed lower-middle class neighborhood of ...

Obama: The victory rally

A joyous crowd cheers President-elect Obama at the Renaissance Center's ballroom.

In Phoenix, Sen. John McCain had finished his concession speech. In the streets of downtown Detroit, the first notes of the celebratory car-horn symphony were being honked and tooted. Up several floors in the ballroom rented by the Democratic Party, lots of folks, including pretty much all the bigwigs, were trickling out. Gov. Granholm and re-elected Sen. Carl Levin had given their speeches and split. Detroit City Councilwoman Martha Reeves and her entourage were exiting as we made our way in.

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