Media disgrace

Last month, the local media turned on Karen Dumas, a top aide to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, with the sort of savagery starving sharks normally reserve for a freshly bleeding swimmer.

Suddenly, the press discovered that the mayor's communications director was an evil sorceress who was bewitching the mayor! Driving good people out of the administration!

For eight days they pounded energetically at her. The excuse was a bizarre lawsuit by Rochelle Collins, another Bing aide the mayor had attempted to quietly ease out of her job.

Non-news flash: People who get fired often file angry and absurd lawsuits. Collins, who has been described to me as "way over her head" in the job she lost, brought forth a doozy: She is demanding $750,000, reinstatement as an "executive assistant" to the mayor, with a salary nearly twice what she was making, and a private meeting and "personal apology," from Dave Bing.

And while she forgot to ask for a pony, she did ask for $100,000 for her husband's "emotional distress and loss of consortium."

Well, we all need a little consortium from time to time, and I hope the poor man gets some. But I don't know why the taxpayers ought to have to pay a hundred grand for it.

Naturally, Collins's suit also savaged her direct boss, Karen Dumas. She said Dumas drove down morale in the office! (Why, whoever heard of any boss doing that?) Horror of horror, Collins also charged that Cruella DeVil canceled a meeting with our sainted senior senator, Carl Levin, because she wanted to shop at Burberry.

Karen Dumas said that was absurd. (Actually, what she should have done was taken Carl to Burberry; the man is a bit rumpled, and could use a makeover before the next election.)

Bizarrely, the media acted as if these accusations were proven facts, and used them as a springboard to destroy Dumas. They incorrectly called this a "whistleblower lawsuit," when it was anything but. Whistleblowers are people in government who courageously come forth with damning information, at great risk to themselves.

Once you've been fired, you aren't a whistleblower. But this was way too fine a distinction for the News and Free Press, and the radio and TV reporters who follow, rewrite and ape them.

The word was out that it was time to destroy Dumas, and stories filled with anonymous sources followed, day after day, coupled with large pictures that made her look like a stressed-out speed addict.

What was baffling is that the same reporters who were out to do in Dumas paid scant attention — at least after the first day — to Rochelle Collins' far more serious charges against the mayor.

The lawsuit says that Dave Bing was plotting a complete takeover of not only the city, but the schools, and that he secretly wrote legislation that his stooge, one Gov. Rick Snyder, could sign.

"I know for a fact that [Bing] was involved in the writing of that legislation and making sure than everything was in place so that the mayor could take control of the city of Detroit and DPS."

> Email Jack Lessenberry