[VIDEO] Interview with Charlie LeDuff, America's most famous TV reporter

This interview is part of an ongoing LARB A.V. series from this year's LA Times Festival of Books. Go to the LARB A.V. homepage to see more interviews with T.C. Boyle, Daniel Handler, Mona Simpson, Leslie Jamison, Walter Kirn, Adrian Todd Zuniga, Terry McMillan and Michelle Hueneven and keep checking in for upcoming interviews with Chip Kidd, Tahereh Mafi, and many more.

CHARLIE LeDUFF IS A PULITZER prize winning reporter, author of three books, and somewhat of an unofficial spokesman for his beloved city of Detroit. But it might be Charlie's unconventional style as a TV reporter — golfing in urban streets, taking baths in the homes of crime victims — that has earned him a reputation as one of America’s most interesting political and cultural commentators.

“How can I give you the medicine with the lemonade?” asks LeDuff. He says sometimes the facts and the numbers just don’t get people angry enough, and LeDuff is too angry — at poverty, at crime, at crony capitalism — to be just another journalist on the beat.

Jerry Gorin of LARB A.V. spoke with LeDuff in this mostly unedited interview at the 2014 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

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