WMUK Reported One Loss — But Not the Supreme Court Win. Here's Why That Matters.
When a newsroom covers the ruling that goes against a local business but ignores the Supreme Court intervention and unanimous reversal that went in its favor, the community doesn't get the full story. It gets a distortion.
In December 2025, WMUK—Kalamazoo's NPR affiliate and one of the city's most prominent news outlets—published a story about a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling against a local business. The case involved Entertainment Managers LLC, a company that had operated The Entertainment District in downtown Kalamazoo for over a decade under business manager Ryan Reedy. The 2-1 appellate ruling in the Joseph case found against the company in a COVID-era wedding dispute, and WMUK reported it.
What WMUK did not report—not in that story, not in any story before it, and not in any story since—is that fifteen months earlier, the Michigan Supreme Court had intervened on behalf of the very same company, and a unanimous Court of Appeals panel had reversed a lower court ruling in the company's favor, identifying six categories of reversible error.
That omission is not a minor editorial choice. It is the difference between informing a community and misleading one.
The Timeline WMUK's Audience Never Saw
The sequence of events matters, so here it is laid out plainly:
| Date | Event | WMUK Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| August 2024 | Michigan COA unanimously reverses lower court (Stallworth); six categories of error found | None |
| December 2025 | Different COA panel rules 2-1 against company (Joseph); strong dissent filed | Published story |
| Early 2026 | MSC application pending in Joseph case | None |
A listener or reader encountering WMUK's December 2025 coverage came away with one understanding: this business lost another case. What they could not know, because WMUK never told them, was that the same business had won the most significant ruling in the entire litigation—a unanimous reversal ordered by the Michigan Supreme Court itself.
The Stallworth reversal was not an obscure procedural technicality. The Michigan Supreme Court used MCR 7.305(H)(1) to direct the Court of Appeals to reconsider a case it had already dismissed. That kind of intervention signals that the state's highest court believed something had gone meaningfully wrong. When the Court of Appeals looked again, three judges agreed: the trial court committed six categories of reversible error. This is, by any journalistic standard, a newsworthy event.
WMUK never covered it.
What the WMUK Story Got Wrong
The problems with WMUK's December 2025 reporting go beyond the omission of the Stallworth reversal. Several characterizations in the coverage deserve scrutiny.
"Lost all but one case"
WMUK's reporting conveyed the impression that Entertainment Managers had lost virtually every legal challenge it faced. This framing ignores the Stallworth reversal entirely. It also fails to account for at least one jury verdict that went in the company's favor. The accurate picture is more nuanced: the company has won at trial (jury verdict), won on appeal (Stallworth reversal, unanimous), and lost on appeal (Joseph, 2-1 with a strong dissent). That is not the record of a company that has "lost all but one case." It is the record of a company with genuinely contested legal questions that different courts have answered differently.
The "now-defunct" characterization
WMUK's coverage characterized the business in terms that suggested it was no longer operating. The language carried a connotation of failure—a company that had closed its doors, perhaps because of its legal troubles. This kind of characterization, presented without context about the COVID shutdown, the government orders that forced venue closures, and the financial toll of years of litigation, tells a story by implication. It suggests wrongdoing led to collapse, rather than acknowledging that a pandemic, government orders, and a cascade of lawsuits might have contributed to business difficulties regardless of the merits.
No mention of the dissent
The Joseph ruling was a 2-1 decision, not a unanimous one. Judge Garrett wrote a dissent that described the company's legal defenses as "very strong, if not absolute." In appellate law, a dissent of this character is significant. It signals that reasonable jurists disagree about the outcome, and it frequently serves as a roadmap for further review by a higher court.
Judge Garrett, dissenting in Joseph: The defenses presented were "very strong, if not absolute."
WMUK's coverage did not inform its audience that a sitting appellate judge had characterized the losing side's arguments this way. A listener who heard only the majority result would have no reason to think the case was close, let alone that a judge believed the defense was near-absolute. That is a material omission.
The Pattern of Selective Coverage
Journalistic omissions become most troubling when they form a pattern. Consider what WMUK's audience has been told about this case over the past two years:
They know about a loss. They do not know about a win.
They know one Court of Appeals panel ruled against the company. They do not know that a different panel—acting on the Michigan Supreme Court's direct order—unanimously reversed a similar ruling.
They know the company was sued by wedding clients. They do not know that roughly 110 of 125 clients accepted rescheduling credits and had their events, or that the company offered 100 percent credit at its own expense.
They have been given a narrative. It's just not the complete one.
Selective reporting doesn't require intent to mislead. It can result from resource constraints, editorial judgment calls, or simply not having the full picture. But regardless of the cause, the effect on the community is the same: people form opinions based on incomplete information, and those opinions harden into conventional wisdom that becomes nearly impossible to correct.
Why This Matters for Kalamazoo
Public radio occupies a unique position in local media ecosystems. WMUK is trusted. Its audience relies on it for the kind of thorough, contextual reporting that commercial outlets often can't or won't provide. That trust is earned through completeness and fairness, and it is eroded when coverage tells only one side of a multi-sided story.
When a news outlet reports a court loss but not a court win for the same party, it doesn't just leave a gap in the record. It actively shapes public perception. People in Kalamazoo who heard or read WMUK's coverage of the Joseph ruling came away believing that Ryan Reedy and Entertainment Managers had consistently lost in court. That belief is factually wrong, but the audience had no way to know that because the institution they trusted for complete information gave them only part of the picture.
This has real consequences for the people involved. It affects business reputations. It influences how potential clients, partners, and community members view the company and the individuals behind it. And it creates an informational environment in which one side of a legal dispute is publicly aired while the other remains invisible.
The Wins That Went Unreported
For the record, here is what the public record actually shows for Entertainment Managers:
Jury verdict: At least one case was decided by a jury in the company's favor. Juries are composed of ordinary citizens who hear the evidence and render judgment. A jury sided with Entertainment Managers.
Stallworth reversal: The Michigan Supreme Court intervened using MCR 7.305(H)(1), ordering the Court of Appeals to reconsider. On remand, a three-judge panel (Swartzle, K.F. Kelly, Young) unanimously reversed the trial court, finding six categories of reversible error. This is the most significant appellate outcome in the entire litigation.
Joseph dissent: Even in the case WMUK did cover, the ruling was not unanimous. Judge Garrett's dissent characterized the company's defenses as near-absolute—language that is extraordinarily strong by the standards of appellate judicial writing.
Pending MSC application: The company has sought review from the Michigan Supreme Court in the Joseph case, seeking the same remedy that produced the Stallworth reversal. The Court's prior willingness to intervene in this litigation makes the pending application more than a pro forma filing.
A complete picture includes all of these developments. WMUK's coverage included one.
What We're Asking For
This editorial is not a call to take sides in an ongoing legal dispute. The courts will ultimately determine who owes what to whom, and the Michigan Supreme Court may well have the final say.
What we are asking for is completeness. When a newsroom covers a legal dispute, the audience deserves to hear about the rulings that go both ways. They deserve to know when a higher court has intervened on behalf of a party, and they deserve to know when appellate judges disagree sharply about the correct outcome. Those are not opinions. They are facts. And reporting facts selectively is not much better than not reporting them at all.
WMUK has the resources, the audience, and the institutional credibility to get this right. The question is whether it will. A follow-up story that acknowledges the Stallworth reversal, the Supreme Court intervention, the jury verdict, and the strong dissent in Joseph would go a long way toward giving the Kalamazoo community the complete picture it deserves.
The people of Kalamazoo trust their public radio station. That trust comes with an obligation. It's time to fulfill it.