Canadians and Americans tend to have a few misunderstandings.
* "Born on a Plantation" makes it sound like he was born before the civil war.
* Hundreds of homes for does not equal hundreds of thousands
* This isn't the only city in America or Canada that has been boarded up or is becoming a ghost town:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_Canada
(Detroit is just a large scale ghost town)
* Many people are trying to revitalize and help Detroit - it's just a very tall mountain to climb. I know someone that was born there and still has family that lives there and they don't plan on moving out.
Detroit is depressing enough as it is. There's no reason for the CBC to try to make it worse.
I don't understand what you were correcting on that report. Namely:
* "Born on a plantation" just makes it sound like he was born super poor. Which he was.
* He never said "hundreds of thousands of homes".... he said "hundreds of houses". He was repeating what the real estate guy had just told him.
* The fact that Detroit is a large scale ghost town was the report's point; the scale of empoverization (that's not really a word, is it?) is both stunning and frightening.
*What does your last point have to do with anything? Of course some people are attached to their homeland and are trying to fix it. It doesn't change the fact that Detroit is currently going through some amazingly tough times.
I think if you're going to use "The Thrill Is Gone" during a news segment on Detroit, you should go with the Diamanda Galas version. That blood-curdling scream sums up Detroit really well.