BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I’m Bob Garfield. In this hour, we are addressing the quandaries posed when bedrock ethical, moral and professional principles push up against one another. For another example, consider the city of Detroit, which we’re often told is the quintessential crime-ridden, post-apocalyptic hellhole.
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MALE CORRESPONDENT: We traveled to Detroit where residents refused to abandon a city blighted by unemployment and crime. \ [END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD: A common media narrative in Detroit is praise for the recent influx of brave urban pioneers, with their Restoration Hardware credit cards, gentrifying the city back into solvency.
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FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Evan Hansen and a partner purchased an old Midtown Detroit abandoned building and turned it into a restaurant more than a year ago.
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BOB GARFIELD: Frustrated with both the depressing depictions of blight and stories dominated by the new residents, Mayor Mike Duggan hired a team of storytellers to feature neighborhoods and communities in Detroit that are often overlooked in mainstream media. But wait, aren’t we supposed to be suspicious, very suspicious, when the government tells its version of the story? Aaron Foley is the chief storyteller for the city of Detroit, and he says there were always two narratives.
AARON FOLEY: It’s either a city on the rise, thanks to all the millennials moving from New York, [LAUGHS] or it’s a city on the decline, thanks to all of the factories that have been closing since the 1940s. And one thing that a lot of people don’t understand is just how big Detroit is. It’s about 140 square miles. And a lot of media attention is focused on downtown, midtown, trendy neighborhoods but then you have about 133 square miles left where these stories aren’t being told.
The glue that holds Detroit together, the community organizations, the block clubs, the churches, the rec centers, places that make Detroit, Detroit don't get the same shine that a new person who has recently moved to Detroit will get. We latch onto whatever’s hot.
BOB GARFIELD: I’m curious to know what you suppose is going on in newsrooms that leads them to repeat the same tired tropes about the city of Detroit. Is it laziness? Is it disinterest, latent racism? What’s going on?
AARON FOLEY: Maybe a little bit from each bucket. One thing that’s definitely hit a lot of our local newsrooms is the decimation of talent through layoffs. You have a lack of institutional knowledge among those who remain. You also see a lot of reporters who may not be as familiar with Detroit as someone who has been born and raised here.
BOB GARFIELD: And, for what it’s worth, your shop -- I think you have six people who you work with who everyone’s a person of color?
AARON FOLEY: Exactly. That was intentional, ‘cause I wanted people who were plugged into Detroit and I wanted people that looked like Detroit.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, I’m looking at a list of some of the stories that you and your fellow storytellers are telling. One is equity, diversity and inclusion, the foundation of Shakespeare in Detroit, vacant Banglatown school to be converted into affordable housing, a lot of soul in this hole in the wall in northwest Detroit, are you Detroit's best home cook? All right, the Pentagon Papers it isn’t. This is [LAUGHS] --
AARON FOLEY: Right. [LAUGHS]
BOB GARFIELD: -- quintessentially soft feature stuff.
AARON FOLEY: I want to fight back against the soft feature stuff a little bit because I wanted to build our audience by first setting ourselves apart. Soul in the Wall, for example, that’s a restaurant that will not win a James Beard award. But they’re been in that space, they’ve served that neighborhood and they’ve got some history in that neighborhood. I wanted something where you could see black people in a city that’s 82% black get the same sort of reverence as your titan businessmen in town.
BOB GARFIELD: All right now, Chief Storyteller, once again, you are a government employee. Can you tell me why yours isn’t just a fancy title for propagandist? Are you to be trusted?
AARON FOLEY: I mean, I’ll be honest, you know, this is the question I’ve gotten a lot, being, you know, thought of as a propagandist. It does sort of bother me because I came from a journalism background. You know, it's not me just throwing away my journalism career just to work for the mayor. It’s continuing what I’ve been doing. You know, I’m trying to make Detroit a cornerstone of what I do because Detroit made me what I am. Now here’s an opportunity to just really, for me, take it to the next level, as well as create this platform where Detroiters can be part of something.
BOB GARFIELD: That editorial independence, is it a guarantee?
AARON FOLEY: I have the autonomy over this. Like, you know, I’m not going to the mayor or anybody else and saying, hey, can you go over this? And I would hope that, you know, I’ve sort of built a little bit of a reputation in Detroit. You know, I have two books. I’ve been a loudmouth.
BOB GARFIELD: One of which, by the way, has the magnificent [LAUGHS] title of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass.
AARON FOLEY: I built myself up to this position, I like to think, and some of the things that I’ve done before I‘m doing now, which is raising awareness for black-owned businesses when nobody else would, telling people, you know, how to conduct themselves in Detroit, from a Detroiter’s standpoint.
BOB GARFIELD: I guarantee you, will come a time where some developer is coming to town and is going to invest a lot of money in a neighborhood that really, really needs it, but you’re going to discover that someone’s being heavy handed about the development plans and it is going to have a really bad effect, let’s just say, on some low-income neighborhoods. Will you be able to write that story?
AARON FOLEY: We got a lot of people that, that are like me in the Mayor’s Office, where we come from some of these neighborhoods, and we don’t want to let our own people down. There’s a guy in our Planning Office who says, if we can’t do it, then nobody else can. But you’re right. If the situation comes, I’m gonna face a challenge.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, I want to ask you one more thing. The FBI Crime Data Report places Detroit on a per capita basis as the most violent city in the United States in 2016. It also has the highest housing vacancy rate in the country. A fifth of the homes are empty. So counter-narratives are great, so long as they don't obscure other truth, How do you make sure that you, in your accentuation of the positive, don't obscure other truth?
AARON FOLEY: First of all, I, I can't change that narrative. That’s something everyone is aware of. I sort of push back against this notion that I'm only gonna cover positive news.
We talked about this phenomenon of Cartier sunglasses. In the late ‘60s, people in factories were still making all this money on the line and a status symbol of wealth were these $2,000-plus Cartier glasses that were very hard to come by in Detroit because you had to be a licensed dealer through Cartier to buy them. Well, the factory wages started going down in the ‘80s but then it became a status symbol among gangs and drug dealers.
We did a quick write-up of it, how people will either kill for them or maim for these very expensive sunglasses, in addition to a video that we filmed on our own about a young woman who had fake Cartier glasses and they were snatched off. And I was like, you know what, this a thing in Detroit. Let’s talk about it on this platform, how this thing happened, and let’s talk about why it’s a thing.
BOB GARFIELD: Aaron, thank you very much.
AARON FOLEY: [LAUGHS] Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: Aaron Foley is the chief storyteller for the City of Detroit and the author of two books, How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass and The Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook.
