Charlie LeDuff

I’m not a journalist, I’m a reporter. The difference between a reporter and a journalist is that a journalist can type without looking. The problem with journalism is its self-importance. Like in the New York Times, there’s style guides; you can’t call a doctor a physician, you got to call him a doctor- too high falutin’. You can’t call an undertaker a mortician- too high falutin’; you got to call him an undertaker. You can’t call a lawyer an attorney, you have to call him a lawyer. But somehow, since we control it, and we’re very self-important people, you can call a reporter a journalist.

All I’ve ever tried to do in life is tell the truth, work hard, document the undocumented. I’ve crossed the border with Mexicans, man, I worked in a slaughterhouse, I do what it takes, I don’t cheat… My problem with the Right Wing and the Left Wing… is they got so many facts wrong… the journalistic sin is: you write something about somebody, you man up, and you call them. So the facts are wrong… A commissioned officer in the Navy accused me of misquoting him, I don’t think I did. If I did, I apologized about it. You write a thousand, two thousand stories, it’s gonna happen.

On October 22, 2018, it was announce the LeDuff would return to broadcasting on WFDF (AM). It is rumored that he may host a show on WADL (TV).

On November 10, 2013, LeDuff was prominently featured on a Detroit focused episode of the CNN series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. In February 2015, Vice News announced LeDuff would be a regular contributor. On December 1, 2016 LeDuff announced that he would be leaving WJBK Fox 2 Detroit; he plans to stay in Michigan. Since 2016, LeDuff has been an employee of American Coney Island diner, working as the restaurant's handyman, while writing a book on the side.

In 2011, LeDuff was sued for defamation over a story he wrote in The Detroit News. A Detroit police officer alleged that LeDuff's stories asserted that she moonlighted as a stripper and danced at a never-proven party at the Detroit mayor's mansion. The officer denied both accusations. The suit was ultimately dismissed.

As of December 2, 2010, LeDuff is a reporter for WJBK, the Fox affiliate in Detroit, Michigan. In 2012, a YouTube video of his reporting on Meals on Wheels became one of the top links of all time on the social network Reddit. His series The Americans, human interest stories about the changing American economy and culture, is syndicated to other Fox Television Stations Group stations for airing on their newscasts.

LeDuff discussed various accusations made against his reporting in a March 11, 2008 interview with essayist Dan Schneider.

From August to November 2006, LeDuff wrote an eight-part series for the New York Times called American Album. The series was composed of articles and videos presenting "portraits of offbeat Americans". The profiles included pieces about "a Latina from the rough side of Dallas" who "works the lobster shift at a Burger King," a Minuteman and an Alaska national guardsman believed to be the first Inuit, or Eskimo, killed because of the Iraq war. LeDuff has covered the war in Iraq, crossed the border with Mexican migrants, and chronicled a Brooklyn fire house in the aftermath of 9/11.

On July 14, 2006, LeDuff starred in and narrated a documentary on the British channel, BBC Four, called United Gates of America in which he experienced life with the mainly white, Christian, and middle-class citizens of a gated community Canyon Lake in Riverside County, California.

A January 18, 2003 article for The New York Times entitled "As an American Armada Leaves San Diego, Tears Are the Rule of the Day" was accused of featuring inaccurate quotations and depictions of two of the ten subjects interviewed, according to an article published in September 2003 by Marvin Olasky in the evangelical WORLD magazine. According to Olasky, Lieutenant Commander Beidler, a subject profiled with his wife in the man-on-the-street piece, recalled saying something else to LeDuff and believed the quotes and depictions of himself and his wife used were inaccurate and fabricated by Mr. LeDuff. According to Olasky, Times senior editor Bill Borders wrote to Mr. Beidler, saying that he had "thoroughly looked into your complaint" and concluding "[Mr. LeDuff] thinks that he accurately represented his interview with you and your wife, and therefore so do I."

A December 8, 2003 article for The New York Times entitled "Los Angeles by Kayak: Vistas of Concrete Banks" was accused of drawing from Blake Gumprecht's 1999 book The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth. One week later, on December 15, 2003, The New York Times appended a clarification:

LeDuff is best known as a contributor to the 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series "How Race Is Lived in America"; a ten part series including a piece by LeDuff called "At a Slaughterhouse Some Things Never Die". In 1999 the Columbia University School of Journalism gave him its Mike Berger Award for distinguished writing about New York City.

After graduating from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, LeDuff was hired by The New York Times on a ten-week minority scholarship. He was a staff reporter at The Times from 1995 to 2007, ending his tenure as a member of the Los Angeles bureau. LeDuff, who had been on paternity leave, quit The Times to pursue the promotion of his second book, US Guys, according to a memorandum from Suzanne Daley, the national editor. The next day LeDuff said his rationale for leaving was more complicated, noting that he made an appointment with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The Times, to say he would be leaving because, "I can't write the things I want to say. I want to talk about race, I want to talk about class. I want to talk about the things we should be talking about."

A 1995 article for The East Bay Monthly was examined by Modern Luxury's San Francisco publication in a February 2004 article titled "Charlie Duff's Bay Area Secret" following suggestions that LeDuff had plagiarized elements of Ted Conover's book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America's Hoboes.

Charles Royal LeDuff (born April 1, 1966) is an American journalist, writer, and media personality. Previously employed by The Detroit News, he left in October 2010 after two years and joined Detroit Fox affiliate WJBK Channel 2 to do on-air journalism. LeDuff left Fox 2 Detroit on December 1, 2016. LeDuff has won a number of prestigious journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, but has also faced accusations of plagiarism and distortion in his career.