Charles Royal LeDuff (born April 1, 1966) is an American journalist, writer, and media personality. He is the host of the No BS News Hour with Charlie LeDuff. LeDuff was employed by The New York Times for 12 years, then employed by The Detroit News, leaving in October 2010 after two years to join the 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, to which he has responded.
Biography
Charlie LeDuff was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. He is one eighth Ojibway. He discovered as an adult that his paternal grandfather was Creole (of African and French descent).
LeDuff grew up in Westland, Michigan. He attended Winston Churchill High School in Livonia, Michigan and the University of Michigan. At the University of Michigan, LeDuff was a brother of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. His father served in the U.S. Navy. His parents' marriage ended in divorce. He has a deceased sister and stepbrother. LeDuff has four surviving siblings. He has lived in many cities around the country and the world. Before joining The New York Times, LeDuff worked as a schoolteacher and carpenter in Michigan and a cannery hand in Alaska. He has also worked as a baker in Denmark.
LeDuff currently lives with his wife, Amy Kuzniar, and his daughter in Pleasant Ridge, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit. He considers himself a political independent, and is a practicing Roman Catholic. LeDuff is also a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa tribe of Michigan.
Writing career
LeDuff's stated writing influences include the books Hop on Pop, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Grapes of Wrath, Treasure Island, and writers Mickey Spillane, Raymond Carver, Joseph Mitchell, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and Raymond Chandler. Among writers in the newspaper business who influenced him, LeDuff lists Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill.
Journalism
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, 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."
Of his professional career in newspapers, LeDuff states:
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.
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.
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.
Controversy
LeDuff has been repeatedly accused of plagiarism and of reporting inaccuracies, to which he has responded.