On a beautiful summer day in July, two-month-old Christopher Bradsher is being baptized in the Oregon Trail Memorial Church in his grandparents' ranch town of Eden, Wyoming. Too bad his father is missing the ceremony. Instead, Keith Bradsher sits in a spare Holiday Inn hotel room in Flint, Michigan, waiting for news to break in the General Motors strike – and talking about what it's like covering the automotive beat for The New York Times. Over the past year the job has been anything but peaceful. Says Detroit bureau chief Bradsher, 34, in a measured, methodical voice: "It can get depressing and difficult at times to be living in a company town where the companies hate you."

Auto company executives have yelled at him until they turned fire-engine red. Former Chrysler vice chairman Robert Lutz wrote Bradsher a letter saying he despised the reporter's brand of journalism. And at a small dinner party, one woman approached Bradsher and said, "You should die." Oh, well, all in a day's work.

The attacks have come along with Bradsher's groundbreaking investigation into the potential safety and environmental hazards of light trucks, a category that includes pickups, minivans, and the popular sport utility vehicles (SUVs) such as the Ford Explorer, Jeep Cherokee, Chevrolet Suburban, and other massive four-wheelers with raised bumpers and imposing grille work. Light trucks are Detroit's hottest selling and most profitable products, accounting for 45 percent of the nation's vehicle sales. Bradsher has blown the whistle on the harsh reality that their increasing presence on the roads can be deadly to passengers in smaller, standard cars. Auto executives, and many journalists on the beat, argue that larger vehicles have always had an advantage over smaller cars in accidents – so why all the fuss?

In many ways, Bradsher has become part of the controversy he is reporting. He has received recognition (including a George Polk award) and recrimination. Talk show host Rush Limbaugh likes to beat up on him. Speak with other auto reporters and they'll tell you that winning a Pulitzer is Bradsher's primary motive in devoting so much time and space to SUVs. Says one automotive writer: "He is the most talked about story in Detroit."

Fairly typical was this blast from P.J. O'Rourke, the conservative pundit, in the July issue of Automobile Magazine: "From a car enthusiast's point of view, Times reporters are some sort of ill-evolved hominoids who haven't discovered the wheel. Among these primitive sidewalk apes there is a certain Keith Bradsher . . . . How Mr. Bradsher picked the light truck as an object for his scorn I do not know. Perhaps he polled his bosses, his co-workers, and all the piffle-headed residents of Manhattan's Upper West Side, then put together a list of things they loathe: normal people, families, manual labor, nature when it's not endangered, Cub Scout troops, scary dogs, and snow and ice that ruin Monolo Blahnik pumps. An assault of light trucks is a blow struck against all of these."

Or consider the words of Dutch Mandel, editor of AutoWeek. Earlier this year, the popular car-enthusiast magazine ran a cover story, titled "The Truck Jihad," that took Bradsher and the Times to task. In a press release touting its story, Mandel said: "It was the Times which chose to pick up the sword against trucks and SUVs – and it is AutoWeek's duty to not only support car and truck passion, but also to bring fairness to the discussion."

Says Bradsher, who probably wouldn't know a Monolo Blahnik pump if he tripped over one: "It's a shame it's gotten so personal." Then he adds: "The automakers have acknowledged they've got a problem. But it's easier to shoot the messenger than address the problem."

So how did Keith Bradsher, a gawky six-foot-four guy from suburban Washington, D.C., whom even Times colleagues describe as nerdy, get to down-and-dirty Detroit, where auto executives routinely broker deals in topless bars and most auto writers are classified as gearheads?

The son of a Polk Award-winning reporter for the Washington Star, Bradsher went to the University of North Carolina on a Morehead Scholarship, filed more than 140 business stories as a Los Angeles Times intern while simultaneously earning a public policy master's in economics from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. He joined The New York Times in 1989, at the age of 25. At the start of 1996, he moved to the Detroit bureau with wife Robyn Meredith, also a Times reporter.

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