Get to know the city of Detroit's propaganda arm

Early in Jan, in the days after Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said he'd be moving forward with a plan to require thousands of Detroit businesses to buy into a costly surveillance program intended to reduce crime, a sponsored post that looked favorably upon the program appeared at the top of our Facebook timeline. The linked content — "Inside the Real Time Crime Center, DPD's 24-hour monitoring station" — had all of the trappings of a news story. There was a headline, a byline, a mix of quotes and information. It was published at a site called "theneighborhoods.org," suggesting it may have been the work of a community news nonprofit. But the story was not journalism. It was written by the Detroit city government — more specifically, its "Storytelling" department.

The department created by Mayor Duggan in 2017 is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation. Staffed by six people, some of them former journalists, its primary objective is to populate a website and cable channel called "The Neighborhoods," which launched as Mayor Duggan was in the midst of a re-election effort that hinged on his ability to thwart perceptions he'd let the city's neighborhoods languish during his first term. The company line at the time was that the site would "give Detroiters and their neighborhoods a stronger voice," filling a void department head and "chief storyteller" Aaron Foley claimed traditional media hadn't.