A few days after enjoying LeDuff's outgoing message, I get a call from a blocked caller ID. LeDuff seems like he isn't thrilled about my pitch for a profile — it turns out he is in fact still sore about the MT incident. Plus, he's done plenty of profiles already.
"What the fuck do I need another profile for?" he asks. "But you are you. I know you're a younger guy there."
He agrees to meet — but only if we talk about the art of journalism.
"If you're just gonna say some shit about me — I don't know what you're trying to do, but if it's a hit piece, be straight with me," he says. I assure him I'm not interested in a hit piece. "I've been run up before, and graciously so, but you move on. Nobody is battling for the soul of literary Detroit — that's the way I look at it. And by the way, it should be an art form."
I posit that perhaps that's precisely the reason he's such a polarizing figure in the local media — maybe his critics want him to stay in his lane, so to speak, to not fuck with the genre.
"Who's polarized? Ask yourself that," LeDuff says. "Is it really the public? It's the people in the business, isn't it?"
As for the rest of public opinion, he says he doesn't read online comments about himself. "There's an old saying, 'Never read your fucking clips,'" he says. "It could be the most awesome thing and 99 people love it. And this one person fucking stabs you, and you can't get over it. It's the one; it bothers you all day. You can't do it that way. You gotta just move on."
As an undergrad, LeDuff says he studied political science and economics at the University of Michigan. (He was also a U-M cheerleader while Jim Harbaugh was the quarterback. LeDuff filmed a recent segment with the new Wolverines coach and asked him if he deserves to be paid $5 million a year. Harbaugh admitted he's probably not worth it but refused to take a paycut. Later in the clip, a surprisingly spry LeDuff performs a toe touch and later, an impressive backflip.) I ask him what he did after, before he got into journalism. "Bumming around the planet all by myself," he says. "You see it, get confident, and start getting a worldview."
After he returned to the U.S., he says, he met a friend at a party who was heading for journalism school.
"I'm not a dummy, but I didn't really know there was such a thing as journalism school," he recalls. He soon enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley's journalism program. I ask if he got any encouragement for his writing before then. "Not really," he says. "I didn't really do much of it. I did, like, poetry and stuff, but no."
He pauses. "You're writing shit down, aren't you?"
He's on deadline and really does need to stop bullshitting and get to work, but he agrees to meet for drinks later that week.
"But don't make it tortuous, man," he says. "Despite what people think, I don't really like talking about myself much. It's weird. Think about it: It's what we do for a living, and someone does it to you."
LeDuff stands out indeed, and stands alone for the most part in what he does, and if he didn't want to talk about himself, we'd find others to talk about him instead.
For starters, an informal poll among media colleagues looking for a contemporary who treads the same ground in the same way comes up with no equivalents. One went further, recounting a rumor that Fox rounded up all of the company's local affiliate station reporters and played them a tape of LeDuff.
Alan Stamm, a Deadline Detroit contributor, "self-styled media critic," "Charlie-watcher," and Detroit News alum cites one specific piece of LeDuff tape as his jump-the-shark moment. It's the infamous one where LeDuff waits with a Detroit woman for hours after her home was burglarized to illustrate Detroit's slow police response times. During the wait, LeDuff picks up fast food, goes back after the woman says she doesn't want ice in her tea, and then takes a bubble bath. (As Devin Friedman surmised in a 2013 profile of LeDuff for GQ, one that named LeDuff "Madman of the Year," the video was "probably the only segment in the history of local network news in which producers at the station had to pixelize a reporter's balls.")
"It verges on self-parody sometimes," Stamm says. "There's other ways to show time passing. You can do a timelapse of a clock, or have your graphics department come up with something. So now, you're acting. ... Is it a news segment or a comedy skit?"
But Stamm concedes that without stunts like that, Deadline almost certainly wouldn't write about LeDuff. "It makes good water-cooler talk the next day," he concedes. "He's definitely shareable. He's definitely clickable."
Another colleague equates LeDuff's antics with the theatricality of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, though those comparisons aren't perfect, either. Stewart is playing it straight, and Colbert is obviously playing a character.
Amanda LeClaire, a producer from metro Detroit who currently works for Arizona Public Media, calls it "Vaudeville journalism," but she doesn't mean that in a dismissive fashion. The gimmick allows LeDuff to go where other journalists might not be able to. "He's kind of like the court jester, you know — he can say some things other people can't say, under the guise of joking about it, or being sarcastic," LeClaire says before evoking an Oscar Wilde aphorism: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth."
But one gets the sense that LeDuff, even at his hammiest, isn't exactly putting on an act for the cameras. LeDuff is LeDuff.
"Charlie's a very kinetic personality. You never forget him," says Bill Shea, who covers media for Crain's Detroit Business. "He probably networks a little better than the rest of us. He doesn't need to leave behind a business card, because you're not going to forget that guy. His genuine personality is his own branding. I don't think it's contrived, which is refreshing and frightening at the same time. People think, 'Oh, he's not really like that.' He really is like that. He's not bullshitting. It's not an act at all."
The way that LeDuff gleefully breaks the unwritten (and antiquated) rules of journalism seems to be the crux of most of the criticism leveled against him. And, locally, there's some sentiment that LeDuff has contributed to the overwhelmingly negative media portrayal of the city. (In defense of focusing on the negative, as LeDuff writes in American Autopsy, "when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it.")
An example of both: Earlier this year, the story of Detroit's "Walking Man" — James Robertson, a 56-year-old whose daily commute involved walking 21 miles to his factory job — went viral after the Detroit Free Press' original article. Soon after, a Wayne State student created a crowdfunding page for Robertson; more than $300,000 in donations poured in.
It was a rare, feel-good moment in Detroit media. But, in an Americans follow-up, LeDuff pointed out that Robertson's new fortune had now made him a target in his own neighborhood, to the point that Robertson had to enlist the protection of the police as he moved.
It wasn't until a day or so after the segment, in a column that would be his Vice debut, that we learned it was LeDuff himself who called the police on Robertson's behalf.
"Is it necessary for him to be a part of the story?" says Jesse Cory, who runs Detroit's Inner State Gallery and once worked as a photojournalist for WDIV. "The story doesn't exist without him being a part of it at that point."
LeDuff eventually does make good on his promise to get some drinks, suggesting we meet at Dino's, a watering hole on Ferndale's main drag, not far from his home in Pleasant Ridge.
He arrives wearing a motorcycle jacket, a button-down shirt, and the aforementioned cowboy boots.
I pull out my audio recorder and ask if LeDuff would mind if I recorded our conversation for my notes — and am somewhat surprised when he says he would. "Sometimes I run my mouth," he shrugs. I can't help but find it funny that a guy who has no problem taking his pants off on television (repeatedly) would be wary of oversharing.
As LeDuff nurses a Bell's Two-Hearted Ale, I ask him to elaborate on what he said when I first met him, about preferring writing over TV.
"I love writing — hard, real writing," he says. He says he still believes in the concept of "the great American longform feature," though outlets for that sort of journalism are drying up.
LeDuff explains that video and writing have their own strengths — with a written story, he can include the hard facts, the stuff you can't capture with video. The Vice columns, he says, are meant to complement The Americans segments; they are no mere transcriptions. "They augment each other," he says.
People crave stories, LeDuff says, told in a structured way. He offers a theory why most evening news stories are about murder: "Murder has a natural climax: The guy died."
He cites the Fox 2 clip where he waited with the woman for the police to show up. "I could have communicated the same information by reading off a list of police response times," he says. "But that would be boring."
LeDuff shares his plans for his next segment, which he will soon film on the East Coast. Washington, D.C., and Wall Street, he explains, are two "Towers of Power" in the U.S. There are only four stops between the two destinations via rail: Baltimore; Wilmington, Delaware; Philadelphia; and Newark, New Jersey.
"I'm going to be riding on the train, and there's elevator music playing," LeDuff says, pantomiming reading a newspaper and humming. "Then I get off in Baltimore — and there's people marching."
In conversation, it can be hard to keep up with LeDuff, who moves from one subject to the next before you can even be sure you're both talking about the same thing. "I've been saying this lately: You can't have 'peace' without 'piece,'" he says as I nod, scribbling the quote down without any context.
I ask LeDuff when he realized he was good behind a camera. His TV work, he says, goes back to his Berkeley days — in school, he took TV 101, and documentary 101, and so on.
I ask about the Fox affiliate rumor. LeDuff looks surprised and amused.
"And when did this conference allegedly occur?" he asks, once again sounding like a mock lawyer. "This is all I'll say about that: I work for Fox News, not just Fox 2," he says. What that means is he pretty much has complete creative control to do whatever he wants. The Americans is syndicated, and Fox affiliates can edit it however they want to fit into their local programming.
LeDuff gets up for a smoke, stretching his arms in an exaggerated basking gesture. "When the zephyr blows, you just have to enjoy it," he says. His wife and daughter are waiting for him at home. He's going to watch the original RoboCop for the first time tonight, having picked up on comparisons of the film's dystopian corporate-controlled Detroit to the real-life Detroit of today. "Speaking of art," he says. "There's life imitating art right there." (Later, I ask LeDuff if he liked RoboCop. He says he fell asleep. "Doesn't hold up. The script wasn't tight.")
