The Ambassador and the Freepsters

A consortium of the U.S. and Canada, Ontario and Michigan, and Detroit and Windsor finally make Matty Moroun an offer he just can’t refuse for the Ambassador Bridge, which then becomes an international government operation; traffic backups increase exponentially.

         –Ron Dzwonkowski, Detroit Free Press, Sunday, January 3, 2010

By Joel Thurtell

Ron Dzwonkowski is taking hits on the Internet for that one-sentence remark, including a negative comment posted here on JOTR.

Like many, I’ve been trying to ponder my way to the  bottom of that–perhaps–offhand comment by one of the best journalists at the Detroit Free Press.

I’m referring to a New Year’s roundup of whimsical or tongue-in-cheek predictions by Dzwonkowski, a former topnotch Free Press City Desk and Projects editor. For some time also, he was editor of the Free Press editorial page, and now he’s a columnist.

But for my money, Ron was at his best in the ’80s and early ’90s as an editor of reporters researching hard-to-get stories about difficult topics.

For instance, in the 1980s, after an Ann Arbor teen accidentally shot to death a buddy while playing with a pistol, Ron suggested I trace that pistol from its initial sale to the point where it wound up in the hands of two kids. Tracing the gun’s history was not easy, but step by step I was able to find the transactions that moved that handgun across the country and into the bedroom dresser of a Kalamazoo cop, from whom the pistol was stolen. End of the trail, seemingly, until it surfaced in a home, discharged a bullet and killed a boy.

As one of the foot soldiers who campaigned under General Ron in the good old days when Detroit had two independently-owned daily newspapers, I was in awe of an editor who could project himself to the sometimes far-flung scenes where reporters were working and instantly grasp the challenges they faced. That quality was rare then, and may not exist now.

I could go on about his ability to abstractly envision the far reaches of a complex story and grasp its importance. I doubt there was another editor at the Free Press then who could have stayed awake while a reporter (me) outlined an arcane form of municipal bond that he insisted was going to break the financial back of Michigan schools, creating an immense bow wave of debt, if it were not exposed and–hopefully–stopped. There was no single smoking gun, no salacious text messages to mesmerize reporters and readers and catapult the story into tabloid infamy.

Ron listened to my explanation of how a cabal of financial advisers, bond attorneys and bond underwriters was steering schools toward financial ruin. Then he assigned me to do something I never imagined the Free Press would allow: Pay my salary to drive daily to Lansing, where I studied Michigan Treasury files on every school district that issued capital appreciation bonds, aka zero coupons, the “creative” financing scheme that was bloating the debt of nearly 100 Michigan school districts.

What Ron wanted was a “big graphic” listing every district that issued CABS, together with the amount of principal and the amount of interest. That way, no matter where a reader lived, he or she could determine if the local school had imbibed the liquor of debt and peg responsibility on their school board.

No school district was too small to hide from the Big Graphic. After two months commuting to Lansing and reading those files, I had a comprehensive knowledge of just how devastating CABs were. Another editor might have cut me off. Ron insisted on the Big Graphic, and together with the stories surrounding it, our CAB project won the 2004 Michigan Education Association School Bell Award and, more importantly, inspired the state Legislature to ban CABs for schools and to require that bonds be competitively bid.

I was reluctant to write about Ron’s comment on Matty Moroun and the Ambassador bridge because, though I haven’t seen him since I retired from the Detroit Free Press two years ago, I have tremendous respect for him both as a human being and as a journalist.

But his reference to Moroun seems weird to me, since Free Press coverage of Moroun and his shenanigans has been light at best.  Why be a wiseacre on a topic your paper pretends is a minor issue? So I keep asking myself, why did Ron write this line in his New Year collection of whimsical predictions?

A consortium of the U.S. and Canada, Ontario and Michigan, and Detroit and Windsor finally make Matty Moroun an offer he just can’t refuse for the Ambassador Bridge, which then becomes an international government operation; traffic backups increase exponentially.

First thing to remember is that Ron has not directed projects in a number of years. He’s now a columnist.

But there’s no reason why a columnist can’t break news ahead of his or her reporter colleagues.

No reason too why a columnist could not, if he or she desired, undertake special investigative projects.

Well, in theory.

I suspect that at its current downsized capacity, the Free Press would not condone one of its columnists spending weeks delving into documents for one set of columns, no matter how earth-shattering or even Pulitzer-inspiring.

There’s a saying in newspapers, “Feed the beast,” and it is true that the monster must be stoked minute-by-minute in this Internet age.

One of the things his critics wouldn’t know is that Ron is an incredible wit, a joker whose audacious and sometimes off-color remarks can spark raucous guffaws in the newsroom. I remember listening to Ron reeling off one-liners in series, one hilarious wisecrack after another that had everyone in earshot laughing uproariously.

Ron is a very funny guy.

Okay, so what’s with the Matty Moroun remark?

Was this just one of Ron’s gags, thrown off in a hurry to meet deadline?

Quite possible, I think.

So, should we then simply put it down as a jest laced into a column listing highly unlikely events?

Well, not so fast.

While I suspect the Moroun comment was indeed meant as a joke, in order to understand its full meaning, we have to reflect on its source, which is a newspaper that moved heaven and earth to put the former Detroit mayor in jail, in part because the paper as a collective journalistic enterprise was pretty sure that convicting and deposing Kwame Kilpatrick would sway the Pulitzer judges. And the Free Press, having come up empty on reporting Pulitzers since 1967, was anxious to garner one. They were correct, too, about the Kwame story. Or half-correct, since they shared the Pulitzer with another paper.

Newsroom culture and newsroom mentality are very important. I had my suspicions about the Free Press’s motives and their hyperdrive pursuit of Kwame Kilpatrick, and they were confirmed when a Free Press reporter told me while the Pulitzer judges were deliberating that “we deserve a Pulitzer–we put a mayor in jail!”

They spent a lot of ink and a lot of money in litigation to oust a corrupt and disgusting political figure. Despite their self-aggrandizing motives, this wound up being a very good thing for Detroit.

But can you imagine a Freep columnist making smart-ass, satirical remarks about the paper’s persistent pillorying of Kwame? Can you imagine a Free Press columnist tossing cold rhetorical water on the Kwame story? Even newsroom wags would, I suspect, hold their tongues when it comes to contrary jokes about the paper’s Kilpatrick coverage.

Not that newspapers don’t have their counter-cultures. But in newspapers, counter-cultures tend not to thrive in the open.

I wouldn’t expect to hear any wisecracks about Kwame coverage in the Free Press newsroom.

Ron’s witticism about Moroun is interesting as a window into Free Press mentality. Ron may not be pope at the Free Press, but he was an editor for years and still is a member of the curia. Might we infer that his offhand witticism about Moroun reflects a certain snide attitude about the journalistic worthiness of reporting about Matty?

If, as I suspect, snide remarks about Kwame are verboten, why is it okay to print a one-paragraph gag about a story the Free Press refuses to cover in any depth?

Several reasons come to mind.

One, the remark could be interpreted as pandering to the billionaire owner of the Ambassador Bridge.

Sucking up to the powerful certainly would not be news in the news business. Engraved on the building where these newspeople work is a motto that says they should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but it’s high above the street and not easy to read. Far easier to bow down to the high and mighty.

But that is just speculation. I don’t have evidence of collusion between Freepsters and Matty.

There is another possibility: Spite.

What if a goodly chunk of the story had been reported by a onetime Freepster whose blog has criticized his former employers for what he perceives as journalistic lapses? Writing about Matty in an aggressive way in the Free Press might signal that the former reporter was correct in his news judgment, and that might just be more of an admission than Free Press bosses could swallow.

Again, I have no way of knowing whether this is correct. Newspapers, like the Vatican, can be inscrutable, and like the papacy, they like to think they’re infallible.

Yet it’s tempting to follow another and similar line of thought. Let’s not forget the context of the remark: It was made by a writer for a newspaper that has been repeatedly beaten on coverage of a wealthy trucking magnate who also happens to own other pieces of Detroit property which have made the news because he refuses to spend the money required to keep his structures intact and safe. The Michigan Central railroad station is only one example. Or the dead body found in a nearby Moroun-owned building that was all too accessible to the public.

In other cities, owners of abandoned buildings are taken to court, even prosecuted. Why does that not happen in Detroit with Matty Moroun?

Would that not be a good topic for a newspaper on the hunt for Pulitzers?

Might that not be a good topic for a columnist wanting to be taken seriously as a journalist?

Or maybe even for the paper’s team of investigative reporters?

It happens that the city did sue Matty to evict him from Riverside Park, where he’d been squatting for years and hoped to take over the public land for the base of a new international bridge. This story, which I happen to think is important, has been covered by the Metro Times, the University of Michigan radio station, a public Toledo television station, once in a while The Detroit News and by JOTR. If you read only the Free Press, you’d think the struggle for possession of that city park was a figment of our imaginations.

While it was buying out, then firing, scores of editorial employees, the Detroit Free Press was also spending huge amounts of money to topple a mayor. While I hope it would not cause the layoff of more Freepsters, why couldn’t the paper spend some staff time to investigate Matty Moroun and his privately-owned bridge between the U.S. and Canada? Why not investigate Moroun’s harassment of a neighboring bait shop or his incessant lawsuits against the state aimed, apparently, at stopping construction of a rival government-owned international bridge?

Here is how Wikipedia describes the Ambassador Bridge:

A 2004 Border Transportation Partnership study showed that 150,000 jobs in the region and US $13 billion in annual production depend on the Windsor-Detroit international border crossing. It is the busiest international border crossing in North America in terms of trade volume: more than 25 percent of all merchandise trade between the United States and Canada crosses the bridge.

The bridge is a BIG story.

Is it too big, too complex, for Free Press brains to grasp?

Is it because the chances of putting Matty in jail are close to nil and therefore a Pulitzer would not be a slam-dunk?

Or does the paper just want to sit back on its demi-Pulitzer laurels and pretend it’s not being beaten by the Windsor Star, Metro Times, and even occasionally by an obscure blog, on a story any self-respecting newspaper would want to own?

If Ron’s comment is the best journalism the Free Press can produce on a story that affects all Michiganders more profoundly than a corrupt mayor in Detroit, then I begin to understand why those Pulitzer judges opted to give the Freep half a loaf.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com

This entry was posted in Joel's J School, Me & Matty and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to The Ambassador and the Freepsters

  1. Fiona Lowther says:

    Know what? I think it’s the equivalent of a blivet — the military term for 10 pounds of manure in a five-pound sack — only maybe in reverse: five pages of what amounts to nothing in a 10-page newspaper . . . Moroun belongs in one of those end-of-the-year lists enumerating the top 10 important stories that weren’t covered by the news media. Personally, I think Dzwonkowski’s reference was just a throwaway line — but Matty will never shape up unless and until he’s visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future.
    It IS strange though, that the local dailies by and large ignore Moroun’s machinations; any reporter worth his/her salt would love to get his/her teeth into such a story.
    And Detroiters had better start paying attention because Moroun’s actions could affect the quality of life — or lack of it — in this area for decades to come.

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