Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [112]
Our first issues came flying out of the gate pointed directly at the established order in Flint. There were stories of Flint’s hangin’ judge, who gave blacks longer sentences than whites, county commissioners fleecing the treasury, Buick rigging the test cars they sent to the EPA in order to show better gas mileage, and some other issues that rang familiar to me: another school board in Flint holding secret meetings, students in Flint being paddled 8,264 times in one school year, and a poll showing the majority of Catholics no longer believing in hell. There were also stories that seemed ahead of their time: an op-ed from a local Palestinian entitled “Where Is My Promised Land,” a story on how processed sugar was poison (with an accompanying recipe for a “natural food” snack), and a warning that GM, then employing eighty thousand people in Flint, had a master plan to leave the city bone dry. That last story established me firmly as the local crazy guy.
The paper quickly became a must-read for those who paid attention to the politics of Flint. The Flint Voice was a true muckraking paper that didn’t care who it pissed off. We did not do cover stories on the “Ten Best Ice Cream Places in Town” or “Twenty Day Trips You’ll Want to Take.” Our journalism was hard-hitting and relentless. We did sting operations on establishments that would not hire black employees. We chronicled how General Motors was taking tax abatement money and using it to build factories in Mexico. One night, we caught them literally dismantling an entire GM assembly line, loading it on a train, and sending it off to be shipped to a place called China. Many could not believe a story like that—“What on earth would China do with an automobile assembly line?! Michael Moore is nuts!” I suffered much derision for exposing such goings-on.
We also offered a place where brilliant Michigan writers could find an outlet. Many, such as Ben Hamper, Alex Kotlowitz, James Hynes, and the cartoonist Lloyd Dangle would go on to become best-selling authors and syndicated journalists. We never missed an opportunity to go after the Flint Journal and, in 1985, I wrote an investigative piece on this miserable daily paper for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Other than the plan by General Motors to destroy Flint (a story that only we would cover in the late ’70s and early ’80s), nothing consumed our attention more than the mayor of Flint, James P. Rutherford. He was also the ex–police chief of Flint. He left behind a number of disgruntled officers who were more than happy to slip us documents and evidence of his controversial activities. One of our first front-page stories on him was entitled, “Did Mayor Rutherford Receive $30,000 ‘Gift’ from Convicted Gambler?” We scooped the Journal time after time (not that that was hard), but one day they got tired of us beating them to the story, so one of their columnists simply lifted our investigative piece and ran it as if they had done the legwork themselves. When things like this happened, we had ways of dealing with it. As we were not educated and did not run in the circles of polite society, we didn’t tolerate the actions of thieves very well, especially if the thief was the Flint Journal. The day after their plagiarism, we paid a visit to their newsroom. We brought with us a pie to give to the editor. No, we were not pie throwers, we were more like re-gifters. The pie tin was filled entirely with dog shit. On top of the pile of steaming poo was a big copyright insignia made from Reddi-wip.
The editor wasn’t in, so we hung around for a while waiting for him to come back. Someone must have tipped him off ’cause he never showed