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The reporter Detroit's mayor hates to see coming

Steve Wilson works to be a thorn in the side of city hall. And of the Tampa TV station he once worked for.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published July 24, 2005

DETROIT - It's the day after baseball's 76th All-Star Game, and the host city is reveling in a rare burst of civic pride.

The game went off without a hitch. Revenues were the highest ever. To visitors who didn't venture too far, the city appeared clean, safe, even attractive.

"We have all pulled together and done amazing things," Detroit's 35-year-old mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, booms at a press conference in the resplendent Fox Theater.

The mayor sits down. He's not taking questions and everyone knows why - the Channel 7 reporter who's pacing like a hyena about to attack. His name is Steve Wilson, and he may be the most aggressive - some would say obnoxious - investigative journalist in television today.

In 1998, Wilson and his wife, reporter Jane Akre, sued Tampa's Channel 13, saying they were wrongfully fired over a controversial story they worked on about milk safety. The couple lost their court fight, but are now petitioning the Federal Communications Commission not to renew Channel 13's license.

Though Wilson and Akre still live in Florida, he commutes to Detroit, where he is senior investigative reporter for WXYZ-Ch. 7. And a monumental headache for the mayor.

It was Wilson who revealed that dozens of Detroit bus drivers had invalid licenses, including a woman who caused 47 accidents.

It was Wilson who discovered that students at one school went months without textbooks while administrators spent over $100,000 on a lavish party.

And it was Wilson who followed the mayor to Washington, D.C., demanding to know why the cash-strapped city was paying $24,995 to lease a Lincoln Navigator for the mayor's wife when hundreds of police and other employees faced layoffs.

In short, Wilson is among the reasons Kilpatrick is trailing in polls before the Aug. 2 primary.

So acrimonious are relations between the two that Wilson has been kicked and shoved by aides to the mayor, who himself called the reporter "a fat a--." The city's cable commission produced a video that slammed Wilson to the tune of Bad to the Bone.

But if he is the mayor's Public Enemy No. 1, he has won legions of fans and helped make Channel 7 the city's top-rated station.

"He may be the perfect match for Detroit, which is a gritty town that doesn't take any prisoners," says Ben Burns, director of the journalism program at Wayne State University.

"His style is certainly offensive to a lot of journalists, and folks in this market have written columns saying he's a disgrace. But he does important stories and asks tough questions."

So on a day when other reporters listen politely as the mayor talks baseball, Wilson wants to know why one of his top aides is still driving a city car that was supposed to have been parked as a cost-cutting move.

Wilson slips out of the theater and trots to a side door, where the mayor's Cadillac awaits. The driver recognizes him and gets on his radio - he pulls the car to the front of the theater, Kilpatrick jumps in and off they roar.

"Mayor! Mayor!" Wilson shouts, but Kilpatrick eludes him.

"I knew they were going to do that," Wilson says in a mix of disgust and frustration. "It's a game to them. This is what politics is about at all levels, except he's not the president. He's the mayor of a city in trouble, and he's not been honest about it."

Wilson works from a tiny, windowless office at Channel 7's headquarters in suburban Southfield. On one wall is a reminder that it's good to be first but better to be right: a framed page from the New York Post with the "exclusive" news that John Kerry has picked Dick Gephardt as his running mate.

From his cluttered desk, Wilson retrieves two recent Emmy awards for investigative reporting. "I point to these not to gloat, but because my friends in Tampa said I was not suitable to report."

Over three decades, the 53-year-old Wilson has worked in top markets, with nearly six years as an award-winning reporter for Inside Edition. But until recently, he seem fated to be defined by a single story and a 12-month stint at Tampa's WTVT-Ch. 13.

In December 1996, the Fox-owned station hired Wilson and Akre for its "investigators" team. They plunged into a probe of BGH, a hormone made by Monsanto that increases a cow's milk production.

Among other things, the couple found what they said was substantial evidence that milk from treated cows poses a cancer risk. Shortly before the series was to air, however, Monsanto lawyers faxed a letter to Fox raising concerns about the reporters and the fairness of their story.

In what a judge called "an eight-month tug of war," the pair wrangled with Channel 13 editors and attorneys in an effort to get a version acceptable to all, including Monsanto. But Wilson and Akre refused to include what they said was false information, and the station grew annoyed by what it viewed as the couple's stubbornness and insubordination.

A year after they were hired, they were fired.

The couple sued Channel 13 under Florida's whistle-blower's act, and in 2000, a jury awarded Akre $425,000. In a densely worded verdict, jurors found the station retaliated against her for threatening to disclose to the FCC the broadcast of a "false, distorted or slanted news report which she reasonably believed" - if aired - would violate a ban on intentionally falsifying or distorting news on TV.

The same jury decided Wilson had not been wronged. He acted as his own lawyer to save money; he thinks jurors were put off by his aggressive questioning of Channel 13's witnesses: "We needed someone to convey the passion we felt, but in order to do that I had to be an a--h---."

Akre's award was overturned on appeal, and she and Wilson were ordered to reimburse Channel 13 for legal costs. This May, they paid the station more than $150,000.

Though unsuccessful in their suit, the couple won a $125,000 environmental prize and became sought-after speakers, seen by many as principled journalists battling a huge media company and a corporation producing an allegedly dangerous product.

But they have been dogged by questions on whether they misused money donated for their legal costs. Three years ago, they bought a $1.4-million home near Jacksonville, paying about $1-million down.

Wilson denies contributions were improperly used. He says the down payment came from his savings, which he wanted to shield in case he had been hit with millions in legal fees and had to declare bankruptcy. "I'm not stupid - I wasn't going to lose everything I had."

Last year, the couple petitioned the FCC to deny Channel 13's application to renew its license. Though the station eventually aired a series on Monsanto's hormone, the petition says Channel 13 broadcast "what was known to be false, distorted and slanted news reports."

The station says the allegations are "a stale repetition" of those in the lawsuit and that Wilson and Akre were disgruntled employees who created a "poisonous atmosphere" in the newsroom.

Revoking a license is rare, but the petition should not be taken lightly, says former TV news director Al Tompkins, now at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies: "Jane and Steve have shown a tremendous tenacity to press their case and be heard even when the betting is against them.

"Fox would ignore this at its great peril."

Since her departure from Channel 13, Akre, 52, has done freelance work. Wilson ran his own long-distance phone company. He doubted he would return to broadcast journalism.

"It's a lot easier to find things on TV that I don't like than I do. Dateline, Prime Time - they have vast resources, huge potential, but what do they do? The Mystery of the Week. What you don't see is a whole lot of stuff that matters, which is the biggest fault of network TV from the top levels to the lowest local stations. People respond to serious stuff, but people have stopped watching because we've dumbed down the news so much."

In 2001, Wilson got a call from Channel 7 news director Bill Carey: They had met years before at WCBS in New York.

"He's a great storyteller who often asks questions and pursues answers that viewers wish more reporters would do," says Carey, now general manager at WFTS-Ch. 28 in Tampa. "He stands out in a sea of mediocrity in both print and broadcast journalism."

For his part, Wilson was intrigued by the opportunities Detroit offered: "I've never seen a city as broken as this one. That's what makes it a great city for investigative reporting."

At first, some Detroiters accused Wilson of racism because many of his reports criticized black officials. But attitudes began to change when he revealed problems in the school system - most of whose students are black - and showed that Detroit police had "railroaded" an innocent black man in their zeal to solve a fatal, high-profile shooting.

"I think people came to see that what I was doing was helping black people victimized by these screw-ups," Wilson says. "By the nature of demographics here, you end up going to bat for a lot of black folks."

His resolve to hold public officials accountable soon put him at odds with Kilpatrick, elected in 2001 as Detroit's youngest-ever mayor.

A Florida A&M grad and son of U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, the 6-foot-4 mayor had the energy, charisma and political clout to turn around their blighted city, or so Detroiters thought. He claims some successes - the riverfront is being redeveloped and the crime rate has dropped, though it remains among the the nation's highest.

But as Detroit's population sank to 900,000 - San Jose recently replaced it as the nation's 10th largest city - the "hip-hop" mayor with a diamond earring has acted "like a teenager given the keys to the frat house," says Jack Lessenberry, a local columnist. Time magazine called Kilpatrick one of the nation's three worst mayors.

He travels often - charging over $210,000 on a city credit card - and is such a notorious nightclubber that Washington, D.C., police refuse to provide him afterhours protection when he visits.

Few things have caused as much flap as "Carlita's car." First the mayor denied knowing the city had acquired the Lincoln Navigator for his wife or family; then he said he had told the police chief to get rid of it. When Wilson tried to question Kilpatrick at a conference in Washington, one of the mayor's aides shoved him into a wall.

The Navigator "quickly became a symbol of the mayor's lack of candor and a symbol of entitlement," Wilson says. "He gets free housing, 21 bodyguards, that's not enough - he's still got to lease an expensive Navigator at the time the city is laying off people and making sacrifices."

In the video produced by Detroit's cable commission, the mayor accuses the reporter of "harassment" and complains "enough is enough." It shows Wilson calling a police officer a "d---h---." (Wilson says he regrets the word but claims the cop was blocking him from getting to a deputy chief.)

No matter how offensive critics find Wilson, many Detroiters appreciate his reporting.

The day after the All-Star Game, as he ran after the mayor's Cadillac, a young woman shouted, "Go get him, Steve!" And added to her companion, "I love the way he chases people."

Wilson bristles at the notion he's a "gotcha" journalist who pounces on unsuspecting targets. He says he always identifies himself and the subject matter, and requests a sit-down interview. But he won't take "no" for an answer.

"These are public officials and public issues and public dollars and it's not an option to say, "I won't be accountable, I won't answer questions.' We're not negotiating - there will be an interview and the only question is whether it's going to be done in a dignified setting or are you going to push me and run down the street. Because if somebody wants to refuse comment, somewhere, sometime, I will be there."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 24, 2005, 00:40:29]