In mid-October, CBS aired this fourteen-minute report on the decline of Detroit, America's former industrial capital.
This is the way Bob Simons introduced the programme:
"Few cities have provided more to more Americans than Detroit. When it filed for bankruptcy in July, it became the largest American city to do that and admit defeat. It wasn't a sudden blow; a hurricane or a tornado. Detroit's decline was more than 50 years in the making. What happened? People will tell you any number of things. They're all true and they're all linked: the decline of the auto industry, race riots, a mass exodus, corruption, bad management and bad luck. The end result: $18.5 billion of debt that Detroit can't pay.
The bankruptcy filing just confirms what residents had known for years: the city that was once an industrial capital of America had hit rock bottom. But there are those who believe that you've got to get there before you can rise again, before you can reinvent yourself. But we begin with what an American city looks like when it has gone bankrupt."
You can read the transcript here.
