TV news legend Rod Meloni joins ML and Marq after retiring from WDIV. Then Shawn drops in and starts a fight by accusing ML of having no groove! Also, the merch store is back — but it won’t be open for long. So act fast!







STRAIGHT DOPE:Check out some of our new swag, as well as some old favorites, and get your new ML Soul of Detroit gear here.







Marq – with a Q – offers ML congratulations on a new journalism award before TRUE journalism legend Rod Meloni drops in to discuss his 43 years in news. Here’s a link to the Free Press stories on the former WDIV colleagues.







Critics are slamming the media for the early headlines that stopped short of saying Trump was shot. ML explains how early newspaper print deadlines are these days and that media organizations try to report only what they can confirm when the presses roll. Then he recalls the erroneous media reports in 1981 which said Ronald Reagan’s press secretary James Brady had been killed. Brady actually survived and became a gun control advocate before dying … in 2014.







One of the historic events that happened on the same day Reagan got shot was the start of Rod’s television news career. Rod started at a station in Bangor, Maine on the same day of the assassination, and was immediately thrown into the news mix, doing man-on-the-street interviews.







Rod grew up in Massachusetts, but you’d never know it. ML asks him if he had to work hard to lose his accent, prompting Rod to slip back into his East Coast patois.







Marc asks Rod how he became such an expert on business matters and Rod explains how when opportunity knocked, he seized the moment.







ML shares the simple tip Rod gave him when he started at WDIV that changed the way ML approached reporting and writing.







It seems like every reporter who worked in the 1970s and 80s had a cheesy mustache. ML asks Rod for his mustache story.







Rod began on the day Reagan was shot and signed off for the last time just two weeks after Trump was shot. ML asks how he felt being retired when major news broke. ML also shares what happened on ML’s own last live-shot on WDIV … and how it got him pulled off the air.







Read Rod’s farewell column here.







Read ML’s latest “On Guard” column here, in which he investigates a deal in which a poor school district wants to spend $1 million to buy a virtually abandoned building. Here’s a link.







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