"Something’s burning," said one reporter to another, absently staring out the window at angry, thick black smoke rising over the city of Baltimore. In a scene from the first episode of the fifth season of HBO's The Wire, the city editor, Gus Haynes, played by Clark Johnson, walks up to the two, dumbfounded by their indifference. "What kind of people stand around watching a fire?" he asked.
David Simon, the man who created The Wire, is not one to stand by and watch a fire. A police reporter who ran after sirens for years, he left the newspaper business in 1995 after 12 years at The Baltimore Sun. In the final season of The Wire, he has created something that feels like he might have written it in his previous life — a riveting five-part series that most newspapers can’t afford to do any more. In this case, however, it’s the newspapers themselves under investigation.
In his article in the New York Times, David Carr concludes that Mr. Simon and his co-author, William F. Zorzi, also a Sun alumnus, have written a scabrous love letter to their old profession that suggests the editors, publishers and corporate overseers are doing little more than heaping bodies on the pyre. There are gorgeous, loving grace notes in The Wire (reporting, for instance, is exalted as "the life of kings"), he notes, but the newspaper business is depicted as the playground of the venal, the inept and the cynical.
In a show of support for the writers guild, on strike in Los Angeles and New York, Mr. Simon said he would not do interviews for The Wire. But he did offer a general observation about the future and past of newspapers, including the one where he used to work. "In The Wire, we have tried to write what we know with regard to every institution in Baltimore and write about what about our experience has been," he said. "The depiction of The Baltimore Sun encompasses all of the problems that are confronting journalism at a time of great stress. The story also captures everything that Bill Zorzi and I love about newspapers."
They get the love right, but do they get all the problems? Television, like all journalism for that matter, is a blunt instrument that often slides over the caveats, the nuances, the subtext. In the search for the killers of daily journalism, The Wire nails some of the details but follows a few false leads.
According to Carr, Mr. Simon’s thesis seems to be that newspapers left the public behind before the public left newspapers. In the first four episodes, less-is-more corporate greedheads denude their papers of vitality and means, creating an opening for a young gunner who cuts every corner he walks by. It’s not the dollars, it’s the dumbing down that is killing the newspaper. "Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone?” Mr. Simon wrote in an article published on Sunday in The Washington Post. “In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?"
The response has been mixed. The Wire has been a darling of the media, often seeming to survive on critical love. The Web is full of vitriol both for and against Mr. Simon’s portrait of a newspaper turning on itself. Ratings are down for this season (suggesting once again that journalists are more fascinated by their business than the public is).
In The Wire’s middle-management aesthetic — the show has previously taken on police departments, city governments and school bureaucracies — the bosses are corrupt and a lot of the workers are mopes. In order for the white-hat city editor to be ennobled, he has to be surrounded by bad guys. In the case of The Baltimore Sun, it becomes necessary for his editor, James C. Whiting III (played by Sam Freed), to be a craven ax wielder, with the added implication that he allowed journalistic malfeasance on his watch. Mr. Simon has always written what he knows, but this one might be a little close to home. Whiting is a doppelgänger for John S. Carroll, the former editor of The Sun. In real life, however, Mr. Carroll had a long, well-documented history of newsroom leadership and of making each place he ran a better one: he left his last newsroom job at The Los Angeles Times rather than carry out grievous cuts of the news staff. In The Wire, he is rendered as a cartoon, a tool of the bean counters.
It is a reflex of almost all journalists to rail against the powerful, including, and often especially, the ones they work for. And Mr. Simon, who has had success with two brilliant non-fiction books (Homicide and The Corner) made into television shows, is still a journalist above all. His production company is called Blown Deadline Productions, and he has that chip on the shoulder that makes real reporters so painful to deal with and such a pleasure to read.
But there are other villains in the story of the daily newspaper that do not lend themselves as well to television. A secular shift in consumer habits and a corresponding outflow of advertising has put many papers back on their heels. Mr. Simon and The Wire flick at those broader challenges, but the series mostly shows an institution collapsing from within.
The life of an editor now is no longer a matter of just following the story. It’s trying to follow the story while fighting against YouTube and the blogs for readers’ attention, fighting for enough ink and paper after Craigslist and Google have taken their bites out of the budget, and fighting to keep the best reporters who can make better money elsewhere (like television).
Mr. Simon is right: Something is burning. But that doesn’t mean it was an inside job
