Richard Byrne Absorbs All of Simon's Critics - Then Shows Why They're Wrong

Simon critics often charge that The Wire draws an iffy sketch of his critical, real-life issues - drugs, schools, government corruption, and now newsrooms.

Many journalists have criticized Simon's analysis of newsroom destruction after the first three episodes. What are these journalists so bothered by? Simon created or referenced buyout meetings, bureau cutbacks, fabrication, the effects of downsized staffs, and other industry plights.

What's so awful about this? These things happen regularly in newsrooms across this country.
He's just as pissed when another major daily slashes three bureaus as he is when The Baltimore Sun does.

Read Byrne's defense.


Ink-stained wretches

The Wire was a media darling until its creator, David Simon, turned his critical lens on the American newsroom. Could it be that he was too truthful?
Richard Byrne

January 22, 2008 9:00 PM | Printable version

Few television series have garnered as much universally glowing press as HBO's urban drama, The Wire. When its fourth season debuted in 2006, Variety enthused that "when television history is written, little else will rival The Wire, a series of such extraordinary depth and ambition that it is, perhaps inevitably, savored only by an appreciative few." Steven Rea at the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that "The Wire could well be, as more than a few critics have opined, the best show in the history of American television."

But as The Wire plunges headlong into its fifth and final season, those layers of sloppy kiss print coverage have not been reciprocated by the show's creator, David Simon.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Much of The Wire's new season grapples with the American newspaper, a once-glorious enterprise ransacked by a dismal convergence of investors' heedless and rapacious pursuit of double-digit profit and a tectonic shift in media technology. It's a storyline rooted in Simon's experiences as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun from 1983-995 - and his unhappy departure from that paper during its precipitous decline in ambition and prestige.

It is surprising is that it has taken so long to create a snappy dramatisation of the decline of US newspapers. Television's last serious look at the business was CBS' Lou Grant - which aired from 1977-1982, an era when "stop the presses" still meant, literally, stop the machines that print the newspapers.

But what's completely predictable is that only a scant two hours into the show's last 10 hours, media types were already in full-on "cover your ass" mode: nitpicking story arcs and portraying Simon as "angry".

Over at Slate, Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz fussed over the "reality" of the newsroom after one episode. "I think I know a little bit about cops, being related to cops, and, more to the point, having written about cops," writes Goldberg, "and David Simon's cops generally pass the verisimilitude test, and this newsroom, so far at least, does not."

At his blog on the Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias feverishly worried the story arc. "Everything in the Sun plot is being marked out like a runway," he complained after two episodes. "Do you think the Unscrupulous Journalist and the Douchebag Editor are going to conspire to cause the Fall of American Journalism? I think they just might!"

But this is small beans compared to the suddenly dominant trope that Simon is too angry to dramatise the American newsroom.

In American journalism, "angry" is a serious charge. It is code language signalling that the object of the charge is unreasonable and not to be taken seriously, and should be marginalised.

Simon gave his critics an opening to it via his public flagellation of two of his former editors at the Sun, John Carroll and William Marimow, as the prime movers in that paper's decline. (He even named a repulsive police lieutenant in Season 4 "Marimow".) But both Carroll and Marimow are prominent journalists who have significant track records and a legion of defenders. (Marimow is now the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

It's a feud that's much too tangled to unravel in an op-ed piece. (The Columbia Journalism Review spent over 8,000 words untangling it in a recent article.) But Carroll and Marimow were largely silent on the issue until the unveiling of The Wire's final season.

Their counterpunch came in a profile of Simon in The New Yorker which kicked off the "angry" trope. Marimow insisted that Simon was obsessed with the Sun: "He is as monomaniacal as Captain Ahab pursuing the white whale." Carroll went deeper into the tin-pot psychoanalysis, suggesting that Simon's jealousy was at the root of his rage: "Bill Marimow won two Pulitzers as a police reporter; David won zero. One doesn't need a degree in psychology to understand why David is so enraged about both Bill and the Pulitzers."

The angry Simon motif was cemented in another profile by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic, titled The Angriest Man in Television. Bowden's article is a spirited defence of Marimow and Carroll (whom Bowden says are friends) and also incorporates Simon's angry response to Bowden's initial draft of the article. It also decries The Wire's essential bleakness and critiques Simon's passion in depicting it as lacking in "accuracy and evenhandedness".

Bowden's real agenda is spelled out in the article's subhead: "How David Simon's disappointment with an industry that let him down made The Wire the greatest show on television - and why his vision shouldn't be confused with reality."

News flash: The fact that The Wire is not a documentary (or even that it's not "evenhanded") doesn't diminish its power or its authority. As The Wire did in its brilliant depiction of Baltimore's dying docks in its second season, and in its bruising examination of public schools in its fourth season, the show's depiction of the American newsroom is etching the moral compromises made in that space and the plunder of the fourth estate by plutocrats vividly in the public imagination.

It is an ugly portrait because what's happened to America's newsrooms is ugly. Ugly enough to make anyone angry. And it's predictable that Simon's media critics would indulge in fits of self-justification and messenger-killing.

But if they really don't like his snapshot of America's depleted and dispirited newsrooms, maybe they should get angry enough to help change those newsrooms - and not the channel.

Critic Gives Some In-Game Advice

The latest piece of criticism I've come across about the show is pasted below. The aforementioned professor who steered me toward The Wire also forwarded me this article from www.campusprogress.org.

I like this critique A LOT. And I don't like it because every line is riveting and preachy about how The Wire isn't a formality, but real life. I like this critique because the writer, Jesse Singal, an associate editor at Campus Progress, hopes Simon's apparent mentality toward the media theme in the first two episodes doesn't persist throughout the season.

The element of this that I really like is that the writer is genuinely upset. Singal seems to be asking Simon to revert back to his usual mentality. A mentality in which the overarching theme or subject (i.e. education last season) doesn't hinder, but is fluidly woven into all the other subjects - drugs, political and business corruption, etc.

Singal's sign isn't a masterpiece. But that's the point - Signal is a hopeful viewer, not just a critical journalist.

She doesn't want to mess up, as she says, the best show ever - through The Wire's first four seasons. She's telling Simon not to knock The Wire off its throne.

Here it is:

Show, Don’t Tell

Excessive hand-holding could bring down The Wire in season five.

By Jesse Singal
January 11, 2008

Bubbles (Andre Royo) sells copies of the Baltimore Sun to commuters in season five of “The Wire.” (Courtesy HBO.com)

The Wire has changed TV. That much we know. In portraying the drug and police trades of Baltimore with unprecedented authenticity and complexity, HBO’s drama has proven that it’s OK to ask a lot of a TV audience. Viewers are capable of following dozens of intersecting plot lines, characters that don’t resort to catch phrases, and long-term stories that don’t end tidily. The title of a recent New Yorker profile of The Wire’s creator, David Simon, was “Stealing Life.” This is as good a summation as any of the show: As The New Yorker put it, on The Wire “nearly every scene is grounded in documentary truth,” but the show still manages to feel as alive and organic as the most vibrant fiction out there.

While the first three seasons of The Wire garnered widespread praise from television critics, the show transformed from an underground phenomenon to a mainstream hit during its fourth season—although based on the show’s inexplicable lack of awards attention, it could be argued that it’s still flying under the radar. Last season, Simon was able to bring together a remarkably gifted cast of child actors and expertly layer the story of perpetually screwed-over young men and women on top of all of The Wire’s usual intrigue. Many critics have referred to it as the best season of any show in television history, and have already pointed out the impossible task that lies before Simon: one-upping himself in season five, the show’s last hurrah.

The first episode of the fifth season, which aired Sunday night, shows promise. We are immediately inundated with a number of the show’s typically interrelated plotlines, most of them connected to the fallout from Mayor Carcetti’s (Aidan Gillen) shift in funding from the police department—and elsewhere—to the city’s failing schools. As a result of this belt-tightening, the major crimes unit—responsible for investigating drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) and the 22 bodies left entombed in Baltimore’s vacant row houses by his chilling lieutenants Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop Pearson (Felicia "Snoop" Pearson)—has been disbanded. The resultant politics feel authentic, as usual. Carcetti has to figure out how to explain to his constituents that the police will no longer be actively investigating the murders of 22 residents, and his discussions with his deputies over how to do so are appropriately cynical. “I don’t want anyone saying we’re giving up on those murders,” Carcetti tells his top advisor (Reg E. Cathey) and two police higher-ups. “I don’t want to see that headline.”

On top of all of this comes The Wire’s newest, and, for hard-core Wire fans, most controversial, plot arc: the newsroom at The Baltimore Sun, which is suffering from severe budget and personnel cuts. The action here focuses on City Editor Gus Haynes, an old-school journalist who isn’t happy with the Sun’s upper management. There’s already been a fair bit of panic about the newspaper storyline. Some have wondered whether Simon, a former reporter at the Sun, simply has too much resentment toward his old employer and the declining state of journalism to tell a story about them with his characteristic nuance and subtlety. He did, after all, tell the New Yorker: “The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.” The “do more with less” line shows up, more or less verbatim, in the episode.

If Simon’s desire to make a point overwhelms his desire to tell a compelling story, season five could end up being less compelling than its predecessors. The Wire, through its first four seasons, deftly touched upon everything from crumbling inner-city schools to the collapse of elements of the white middle class to the politicization of police work to the racial intricacies of politics—and this is an extremely abbreviated list. It has always been clear that Simon and the shows other architects have strong opinions on all of these subjects, but said opinions are never delivered in a heavy-handed way. When the show makes a point, that point slowly bubbles up and forms itself through layer after layer of plot-driven complexity. There are no flashing signs that say “THIS IS THE MORAL.” The story provides the point, not vice-versa.

That is what has people so worried about the Sun plotline. Simon’s vendetta against the paper makes itself apparent in the first episode. The scenes at the Sun contain far too many instances in which a Good Journalist goes toe-to-toe with a Bad Journalist. At one point the paper’s white executive editor, James C. Whitting III (Sam Freed) sits in on a metro desk editorial meeting. After a reporter mentions an almost-completed story about the University of Maryland not meeting its desegregation goals, he quickly tables the idea. He tells the staff that he has spoken with his friend, the school’s—also white—dean of journalism, who assured him the situation was improving, statistics notwithstanding. As he finishes up this lame excuse, the camera lingers awkwardly on Haynes as he smirks, almost directly at the viewer, for a good three or four seconds.

Yes, we get the point: Haynes is a good journalist with integrity, and Whitting isn’t. There are similarly strained scenes throughout the episode, such as when two of the Sun’s younger staff members, Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress) and Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), have a drink at a bar. When Gutierrez asks Templeton where he wants to end up career-wise, he quickly replies, “Times or Post. Where else?” Gutierrez says, “I dunno, this is still a pretty good paper.” There are more subtle ways to signal that one character is more baldly ambitious than another than through thin dialogue like this.

The problem here isn’t that some characters are being portrayed as more virtuous than others. The Wire has never withheld such judgments—most viewers are rooting for Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), the gay stickup artist who only robs drug dealers and who lives by a stringent, coherent code that dictates he leave civilians alone, and not for Chris and Snoop. But Omar, Chris, and Snoop rarely sit around talking about their philosophies, or lack thereof. We’ve come to judge them based on their actions, on the fact that one is a Robin Hood-like figure and the other two execute a vicious drug dealer’s enemies with a gunpowder-powered nail gun.

More of The Wire’s characters have been slowly drawn via dozens of interactions and decisions. Some are more inscrutable than others, but almost all of them defy easy description. Even those that seemingly fit a cliché—Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), after all, is the stereotypical Cop Who Gets Results, Rules Be Damned—manage to transcend that cliché through sheer depth and the intricacies of their lives within the show. There’s a danger, however, that the newsroom of the Sun will be a mere storyboard, whereas the show’s other venues are rich dioramas. No one who watches The Wire is interested merely in a battle of “good” reporters versus “bad” reporters at a declining paper; no, we want the details. We want the backstabbing, the compromises, the maneuvering. These, after all, are the engines of the rest of the show. And none of them can function correctly when the show’s characters carry giant neon signs displaying their archetypes.

Of course, I could be overreacting. We’re still only one episode in, and there is certainly time for these characters to be fleshed out. Overall, the first episode was quite good. But two scenes neatly encapsulated all of the concerns shared by many of The Wire’s fans. Early in the episode, Templeton says, “I wonder what it would be like to work for a real newspaper.” Later, McNulty says, “I wonder what it would be like to work for a real police department.” Again—we get the point. The average Wire viewer, of course, picked up on the fact that Baltimore’s police department and major newspaper are in similarly dire situations long before this lead-fisted reminder. As the season progresses (and all episodes are already wrapped, so we’ll have to hope for the best), hopefully The Wire will remember that it needn’t treat its viewers like kids, and that its ability to tell adult stories in an adult way is the reason it’s so brilliant. Through four seasons it has been the best show in television history, and excessive hand-holding is one of the only things that could prevent it from solidifying this legacy.

Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor at Campus Progress.

David Simon Vents His Feeelings and Career Experiences - Part II

Here's the rest of the article folks. Enjoy.

I am at lunch with the new managing editor as I prepare to return to the newspaper after a second book leave. The first book, Homicide, had done well and been made into a television show.

I cowrote a script for the drama, won a screenwriting award, and was offered a television gig for more money than The Sun could ever pay. Instead, I returned to the newsroom and, employing everything I’d learned about crime, violence, and nonfiction narrative from the book project, managed to become a better reporter.

After two years, I’d gone back on leave to report a second book, a year in the life of a city drug corner. I now had an even better sense of the city, of the drug war and its frauds, and I was saving string to write a four-part series on what ailed the city police department.

It was complicated: The B.P.D. was caught in a crossfire of bad practices, bad policies, and simple circumstance. But complicated was what could make the series strong and fresh; complicated was the good part. I try to explain, but the M.E. wants to ask instead about newsroom morale.

“What are people saying?”

“About what?”

“About me.”

“About you? I guess they’re waiting to see where you go with it. The new hires certainly believe in you and John. You hired them. The veterans are waiting to see.” I take a breath, venture further: “You and John came in and said a lot of things publicly about the paper being weak, and naturally that’s taken to heart by the people who were here, working hard. There is some deadwood, I know. But there are people doing fine work, and I guess they’re worried that this isn’t acknowledged.”

“Who is saying this?”

I tell him that he’s asked me for a general sense of what was being said in his newsroom and I had provided such.

“Who is saying these things?” he asks again. “You can tell me, and I won’t reveal the source.”

“Bill,” I reply, “I’m not a snitch.”

We finish the meal in near silence. On the walk back to the newspaper, he asks me again, and I tell him that it is unfair of him to ask me to betray the confidence of coworkers.

“It’s not personal,” I add.

He cites Mario Puzo’s Godfather, the passage where Tom tells Michael that it’s business, it’s not personal. “Everything,” he assures me, “is personal.”

And for the most part, he will be proved right.

No, it won’t be personal when The Sun closes its evening edition and combines staffs, making it a one-newspaper town. And it isn’t going to be personal when Times Mirror puts together a couple more buyouts to reduce the number of reporters and editors on the paper that remained.

To most, the staffing reductions of the 1990s will seem inevitable, almost sensible given the loss of The Evening Sun. But in retrospect, this would be the moment when we finally gave up the pretense of being even a great regional entity, of transforming The Sun into a newspaper with enough resources and authority to truly address modern complexities.

At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology -- newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price. And when the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might -- even amid the turmoil of the Internet -- still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.

In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.

No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the “impact” that The Sun’s coverage has achieved -- covering your own coverage -- the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.

If the newspaper cares about something in December, it cares nothing about it in January; the prize cycle follows the calendar year. If you can source something to The Sun’s reporting -- to documents obtained by The Sun or The Sun has learned -- it reads better than to simply cite the facts, even if they are from the public record. If a politician fails to respond to your reporting by scheduling a hearing or issuing a position paper, you bang on him until he does so.

And worse still, in the newsroom where I grew up -- a semi-intellectual environment where everyone once seemed to be arguing about everything all the time without actually impairing their careers -- dissent will become problematic.

This is the personal part.

Because the new way of doing business apparently leaves no place in the newsroom for fundamental disagreements about content, about reportage, about the substance of what we are doing or not doing. Arguments over quotidian matters such as the slant of Mideast coverage, or an ethical debate over attribution, or the use and overuse of a stylistic device will soon bring transfers and demotions until, finally, an exodus begins. And it will not be the deadwood; those taking the buyouts or simply leaving outright will be the ones with options: Struck, Alvarez, Robinson, Zorzi, Thompson, Wooton, Lippman, among far too many others -- the departures will be the veteran voices of a good newsroom. When they come for Littwin -- our best columnist -- it will involve their anger at a Guild bulletin written during contract negotiations.

“Bill,” he tells the managing editor, “it’s not personal.”

And in response: “Have you ever read The Godfather?”

The divide between new hires who embrace the prize culture and the old guard, many of whom find it a little shameful, will be exacerbated. And old against new is senseless. For the paper to get better, it needs to retain the talent it has and add more. They won’t be chasing the weaker reporters; they’ll be alienating the core of the institution, leaching as much talent as they hire.

So I write a memo to the top editor, arguing this privately, urging him to reconsider this self-defeating mythology in which no one here knew a thing about newspapering until the new regime. Old and new together can build this paper into something greater than the sum of its parts; new set against old cannot.

No response, not a word, except the editor manages to spike my next story without explanation or comment. I go to see him.

“I was disappointed in that story,” he says.

“How so?”

“It was trying too hard not to be a newspaper article.”

“John, I happen to know the feature editor you brought in here to encourage narrative writing -- she read the story in the kill basket and then came in here and told you she couldn’t see why you spiked it. She told you that was the kind of story you brought her here to do.”

He says nothing to that, so I press him: “That’s some of my best work, John. If you spiked it because you were mad at my memo, we can talk about that. But if you spiked it and you’re telling me that kind of journalism has no place at The Sun, then I guess I have no place at The Sun.”

“That,” he says, “may be the case.”

I get up to go, feeling as if I’d cut my right arm off with a butter knife. Before I leave, though, I do one last thing: I speak up for some people in the newsroom, honest players who had watched as standards had changed and who are too scared to complain openly. You’ve hired a lot of good new people, I tell the editor, and I’ve happily worked with many of them.

But there’s a fellow here who is cooking it. He’s trying too hard to write impact stories and he’s making it up and John, we’ve retracted a couple stories already. “You might win a Pulitzer with a guy like that. You might also have to give it back.”

“Who?” he asks.

I give him the name.

“Well,” he says, “one bad hire out of twenty-five is a pretty good record, don’t you think?”

I allow that it is. Then I go to see Rebecca, who is editing one of my last stories. It’s about a couple of homicide detectives -- smart, competent players -- who are working a last week before taking retirement.

Her cursor rolls down the screen and she highlights a quote from one: “My friends are all gone now and the place doesn’t seem the same to me. It’s just time.”

She moves on to some of my own verbiage: “. . . it isn’t the casework they plan on remembering; it’s the time spent doing that work -- the camaraderie, the banter, the strange things that a cop sees every time he goes out on the street . . .”

Rebecca Corbett gets it. She starts to cry and I am secretly delighted. It’s always good when you get your own editor.

“You wrote a goodbye,” she says. “Didn’t you?”

I tell her that I am, in my mind, a newspaperman still. I just don’t work for a newspaper anymore. I tell her that I will go to television on a lark, learn a new skill set, but I’ll eventually get back to what it is I’m supposed to be doing.

Four years later, I am in an editing suite in New York, working on an HBO miniseries. And I get a call from an old friend, a veteran of a newspaper that once lacked for impact but gave good weight to getting it right.

“He did it again.”

“Who?”

He gives me the name. And immediately I know.

This time, the newspaper had been required to apologize privately to the governor. A story -- part of a series of articles tailored for a prize campaign -- claimed that the governor visited with black ministers in Baltimore, solely in response to the power of The Sun’s coverage.

Except it hadn’t happened. Not any of it. The meeting was about something else entirely. The ministers -- one of whom was quoted at length about the righteous things he told the governor about The Sun’s Pulitzer-worthy issue -- had uttered nothing of the sort.

I am a free agent at that point, clear of any newsroom politics or careerist worries. Fuck it, I call the publisher and leave a message. But it’s the editor who returns the call.

“An honest mistake,” he explains.

“John, there’s nothing honest about it. This bullshit about having impact and winning prizes? It leads to shit like this. The guy’s making up meetings that never happened. There are quotes that no one ever said.”

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“It’s the third time you’ve retracted one of this guy’s stories. Not corrections -- I’m talking about the very premise of the story having to be retracted.”

“What were the other two?”

It took me a long moment to regroup.

“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”

I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.

And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.

Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.

I have no way of knowing that for all of its claims to renewed greatness, The Sun will glean three Pulitzers in twelve years, as compared to, uh, three Pulitzers awarded to The Sun and its yet-to-be-shut-down evening edition during the twelve years prior -- a scorecard that matters only to a handful of résumés and means nothing to the thousands of readers soon asked to decide whether they need a newspaper that covers less of their world.

I can’t yet see that what ails The Baltimore Sun afflicts all newspapers, that few, if any, of the gray ladies are going to be better at what they do, that most will soon be staring at a lingering slide into mediocrity.

I only know, as I hang up the editing-suite phone, that I’ve lost my religion, that too much of what I genuinely loved is gone. I turn to David Mills, my coproducer on the HBO project. He’d worked with me on the college paper, then at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post. But we wrote that first television script together, and when I returned to the metro desk, he went to Hollywood, never looking back.

“Brother,” I say, “we got out just in time.”

True enough. But the other day, I saw a column of black smoke due east of I-95 just above Eastern Avenue -- dark and thick enough that I drove there. It was a roadside car fire, no injuries. Nothing worth a call to the desk. Good thing, too, because Spry is long dead, and Ettlin retired last year. Who I was gonna call it in to, I have no clue.

David Simon Vents His Feelings and Career Experiences - Part 1

A reader of the blog forwarded me this first-person narrative written by David Simon himself. The piece presents some negative emotions about journalism that concur with the air, or emotional environment, in the first two episodes of the Fifth Season.

Here it is:

A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back

By David Simon

The new season of The Wire tackles the world of media, specifically The Baltimore Sun, generating a firestorm of controversy around series' creator David Simon. In this sneak peek at his essay from Esquire's March 2008 issue, Simon offers a tribute to the newsroom he once loved.

HBO's The Wire has been labeled by many (including us) as the best TV drama ever made. The show's fifth and final season began this month and it focuses, in part, on the struggles of a daily newspaper in decline. That part of the story is set at The Baltimore Sun, and it has generated plenty of ink about the strained relationship between creator David Simon and The Sun, where he worked as a reporter for 13 years. In this advance look at an essay from Esquire's March issue, Simon makes his case.

***

To this day, I can -- if I suffer to think on it -- stand apart from the moment, watching as I try to slip my own skin, to disappear myself.

I have hair and forty less pounds. I’d pressed my pants for the first time all semester, even worn a tie, though I took it off in the car, thinking it made me look presumptuous. Shit, I am in that newsroom looking like the college kid I am, a fifth-year senior anyway, surrounded by the battle-hardened professionals of a delicate, precise craft.

They know I am ridiculous.

They’ve read it, in fact.

At the four o’clock meeting in the conference room, there is revelry -- at my expense no doubt. From my perch on the metro desk, I hear Phelps, the state editor, say something, his words followed by a burst of laughter. Fuck, shit, fuck.

That week -- my first as a Baltimore Sun stringer -- I had done something remarkable. I had managed to declare that oral sex was no longer a crime in Maryland. I felt sure of this when I wrote such and had it published in my state’s largest newspaper. Having edited the campus daily the year previous, I was confident in The Diamondback’s reporting and comfortable using it as boilerplate for Sun articles I wrote about the university. And in covering a rape trial involving a student victim, I misinterpreted an appellate decision and single-handedly liberated the blowjob from the shackles of Old Line State tyranny.

The first phone call came from a member of a gay-rights group, and while I abhor stereotype as much as the next man, I confess he lisped at me in disgust: “Check your facts, mister. When I suck cock, it’s very much a crime in Maryland. . . .”

The second call, somewhat more restrained, came from John Bainbridge, The Sun’s man at the court of appeals and a lawyer in his own right: “Listen, I read your article today, and I’m not sure you’ve got the appeals decision correct. . . .”

So it’s my first correction -- an ugly one. And my secret, sacred, wafer-thin plan to write my way onto a major metropolitan daily had been rendered ridiculous in a solitary blow. All that remained was a Bushido-like end to it, a slow, ceremonial evisceration on the newsroom floor. Listening to my excuses, Phelps had been short and blunt: “Write the correction and call it in to rewrite.”

The rewrite man -- the legendary Jay Spry -- took the time to re-explain my obvious failings in the matter, all the while addressing me as Mr. Simon, as if decorum required the condemned be granted one last comic honorific. So journalism was out. And I was still about forty credits short of an academic degree. Options: I had been a busboy. I had played guitar in bad bar bands. I had edited my college newspaper, and now, given the chance to report for one of the great gray ladies of American newspapering, I was a fucking joke.

“What are you going to do?” my girlfriend asked.

“Tend bar, maybe.”

“How do you make a grasshopper?”

“Rum and coke?”

A day later and Phelps called again. Some kid had goose-stepped down the hall of a campus dormitory and fired a BB pellet into a coed’s leg a few months back. Seems he was going to be sentenced to community service in Upper Marlboro. I hung up the phone, wondrous that my shame had not been referenced, then drove to the circuit court the next morning.

And now, with about twenty-five inches filed and sent to the state desk, I have come to rest, waiting while editors in the four o’clock shape the next day’s local front. I am sweating profusely, unsure what to do with my hands, my face, my soul. A Styrofoam cup of water sits in front of me, untouched. More laughter from the conference room, and finally they emerge -- Phelps and the others.

He looks at me, pulls on his mustache, frowns.

Dead. I am dead to him.

And then Phelps turns and whispers something to the tall editor beside him, something about me, clearly, because the tall guy is heading my way. I rise and actually drop my eyes. It will be fast, I tell myself. It will be fast and then I can go.

“You’re Simon?”

“Yes.”

“Good story today.”

I wait.

“I like the way you held back some of what you had, the quote from the Anti-Defamation League guy at the end. Too many people write the top of the story and then have nowhere to go.”

He extends a hand.

“I’m Steve Luxenberg. The metro editor.”

“The correction,” I blurt.

“Yeah,” he nods, ready for it. “You can’t rely on other people for your boilerplate. You need to report everything.”

He pauses.

“But that’s a good story going tomorrow.”

He leaves and I stand there for a long moment, looking around the newsroom: Phelps at the state desk, twisting that god-awful mustache, editing. Spry and Ettlin on rewrite, catching dictation from Paris or Washington. Bainbridge, Banisky, and two dozen others I couldn’t yet name banging out copy at the deadline rush. An expanse of computer terminals and battered desks so vast that it can only belong to one of America’s great newspapers.

I have a story in The Baltimore Sun tomorrow. At five that morning, I drive to an all-night drugstore, buy six copies, return to bed wide-eyed, alert.

“Good?” my girlfriend asks.

“Local front. Stripped, with art.”

She gives a small sound, buries her face in a pillow.

“The metro editor knows my name.”

A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back - Page 2

I had read my Mencken. I knew what he said about newspapering, what he claimed for the profession. “The life of kings,” he called it. And for an adolescent growing up in the mid-1970s, it appeared exactly that.

Emerging from childhood, I had seen Halberstam and Hersh take apart the fraudulent premises and practices of Vietnam, then followed daily as my hometown paper brought down Nixon for stealing an election and lying about it. My father, a public-relations man with latent ambitions as a newsman, took all the local papers and The New York Times on Sundays, as well as every newsmagazine. When I was twelve, he took me to Arena Stage for a Front Page revival. “Who the hell’s going to read the second paragraph?” wailed Walter Burns.

I laughed until I hurt and left the theater oversold. I would be a newspaperman. I would join the great gray line of ink-stained hacks, a character of the kind that my father knew and loved. From the Swopes to the Runyons, from Broun to Pegler to Mencken, then back again to Hecht and MacArthur, Homer Bigart and Meyer Berger.

I was an angry kid, by and large, with a cynic’s wariness of authority that was in harness with a good newspaperman’s contempt of cant and hyperbole. I loved a snide turn of phrase. I edited my high school paper, pissed off the faculty advisor, who thought about firing me, won some awards. I edited my college rag, pissed off the media-board chairman, who thought about firing me, won some awards.

I spent the fifth year of college pulling more than a hundred bylines in The Sun. They hired me to fill in for a reporter on leave, and when that reporter returned, Luxenberg gave me a permanent position. At twenty-three, I was the youngest reporter on staff, covering ghetto murders, drug raids, and four-car fatals. And while The Baltimore Sun might not be the greatest name in major dailies, it was a solid, serious enterprise, a second-tier paper with a national presence. It was carrying seven foreign bureaus, a twelve-reporter Washington bureau, a national desk with its own general-assignment staff. And here was the thing in 1983: The Sun was going to get better. Most all of America’s newspapers were going to improve, except maybe for those afternoon editions already being butchered on the altar of television news. There was some consolidation still to come, a shaking out of the weaker rags in multipaper markets, but on the whole, the big market dailies were monopolies, providing the only serious, consistent coverage of their cities.

Watergate and Vietnam had shown how essential a sophisticated newspaper could be, had proven that while the daily chase of sirens might belong to television, the examination of real issues would demand smarter, comprehensive coverage. Television would be the new tabloids, but newspapers would hire more and better writers and transform themselves into the new magazines. And magazines? Shit, they were going to be publishing masterworks if they wanted to compete with the best newspaper writing. Twenty-five years ago, newspapers -- the big ones at least, those controlling their markets -- were unrivaled in their relevance.

So The Sun would also rise. This much I knew.

I am sitting in a car on the 900 block of Baylis Street in southeast Baltimore, engine off, watching a door and waiting. Zorzi is beside me, checking his notes.

“Black family? On this street?” He shakes his head.

“Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

It didn’t. Baylis ran through Highlandtown, an all-white working-class neighborhood. But the address is all we have left on the string.

“You want to hit the door?”

“I don’t want to go up there cold,” I say. “Let’s wait and watch. See what’s up.”

And so we settle in. The address has come from the police computer, listed as the last location on a twenty-something black guy with a particular name. I got that much by convincing a plainclothesman to sign into the system and do a search for me.

The name itself? That came from an old court case, a file Zorzi dug from the courthouse basement. Not satisfied with the docket alone, he’d found the court reporter and had the full proceedings transcribed, and sure enough, a kid named Dontay Carter had used this name and D.O.B. as an alias, pretending to be someone else at his sentencing on a gun charge.

So on a hunch, my plainclothesman runs the alias, and we come up with a minor arrest eight years back on Greenmount Avenue and a request for a gun permit to work a security job. The permit request gives us this Baylis address.

And the Carter kid? He’d killed a guy, carjacked and abducted a couple others -- a salesman, a Hopkins physician, taxpayers, white people. For a week or so, he was a one-man crime wave until police finally ran him down and charged him, identifying him as simply Dontay Carter, of no fixed address.

And so this was journalism. A scavenger hunt -- from A to B to Z on a patchwork of known facts and guesses. It was not the most important story I’d report on, nor my best work. There were stories to be written that would argue for social change, stories that might challenge the institutional status quo, stories that might win prizes. Many of them would be legitimate and some would be manufactured, and, yes, there is stuff in my yellowed clip book that creeps into those categories. But when I think back on what I love about newspapers, I think of sitting in that car, waiting with Bill Zorzi.

For me, the religion was in the chase, the pursuit of accumulated fact and quote, the rush to deadline, and the arrogance of standing up like the village griot at the campfire and running down a story that hadn’t yet been heard. And then the next day, maybe, doing it again.

For that alone, I can have no regrets. Nah, son, fuck law school. And fuck the M.B.A. I’ll never have. And fuck all that Chaucer and Cervantes and Proust I might never get around to reading. On a given day, I learn something that you didn’t know and then, my authority drawn only from scrawl on pages of a pocket notebook, I write it up clean so the rest of you can get your hands filthy with ink, reading my righteous shit. In the less fevered lobes of my brain, it was as pure as that. I swear it was. Never mind the clouds on the horizon. Never mind that the paper was sold by the Abell family after a century and a half of local ownership. Besides, everyone in the newsroom is congratulating one another on having gone to the L. A. newspaper chain, rather than, say, Gannett. If you had to get bought, everyone says, Times Mirror was the way to go.

And yes, there’s talk of some buyouts, but the rumors were talking about no more than twenty or thirty positions across the newsroom. If that happened, it wouldn’t cut too deep.

And then there’s the new management coming in. Fresh faces with great reps and résumés -- John Carroll from Lexington, a Sun veteran, and Bill Marimow from Philadelphia. These guys were ascendant, their reputations preceding them. Would they be signing on in Baltimore if the future here is anything but bright?

When the first buyout offer was finally on the table -- a year’s salary to anyone who left the Sun voluntarily -- I interviewed with the Washington Post and was offered a job on their metro desk’s investigative unit. I turned it down before talking money with anyone, telling the Post M.E. I was staying in Baltimore.

“I actually resent the notion that everyone thinks there are eventually only going to be four papers worth reading.”

He was polite: “Let us know if you change your mind.”

And even after the first buyouts, there was still a lot of talent in the newsroom, a reservoir of beat knowledge and institutional memory and ethical ballast. Beside me in the car that night, Bill Zorzi is the most dogged, most wonderfully neurotic reporter I know. To work a story with him is to double your reach, and if there is a fact that needed to be known and could be known, he would eventually bring it back and lay the notebook page in front of you like a house cat offering up a murdered mouse.

And while we sit on Baylis Street, I know that Eileen Canzian -- having covered social services and poverty for years -- is quietly working sources, pulling Dontay Carter’s juvenile files and copying each relevant page.

If I needed mayoral quotes, I had Banisky, who owned City Hall. And Warmkessel is over at the city courts if we needed anything else from the clerk’s office there, just as Ettlin or Jane Smith is on rewrite if we need to throw last-minute calls.

And when it finally comes together and it’s time to write, it would be Rebecca Corbett moving it to the desk, and she will protect the copy. Shit, she’ll make it 20, 30 percent better -- graf by crafted graf.

We are good and we are still getting better. And good things come to the patient and faithful, to those who sit and wait. Like the black guy rolling down the street -- age, height, and weight to match the police-computer readout. Sure enough, he’s pulling on the screen door, using his key.

“Bill, I have an erection.”

“Me too.”

At the door minutes later, I use the guy’s name as if I’d known him my whole life, talking fast, leaving no spaces for him to argue or usher us out. Dontay Carter pretended to be you in court some years back, using your name and D.O.B. Why?

“I’m his half-brother.”

Of course you are.

“Do you happen to know where his mother lives?”

“No, but my mother might.”

“Can we call her? Right now?”

And after rushing across town and interviewing the stepmother, we learn more about the life of a violent young man but that, no, she has no idea where Dontay had been staying or where his birth mother can be found.

“I know she was in the hospital. She got burnt with lye.”

“Burnt?”

“Someone threw lye on her. Dontay said so.”

Rebecca is telling us that we have to start writing, that the piece needs to be early if it has any chance at the Sunday front. I go back to the newsroom, where a full take of Carter’s history in foster care, along with careful, annotated notes from Canzian, greets me. I leave Zorzi on the street, telling him we have to locate the mother, that the piece can’t run without quotes from the woman who brought Dontay Carter into the world. He calls every area hospital. He asks for a computer check on ambo runs for burn victims going back weeks. He checks with the patrolmen working the neighborhood where she’s last seen. Nothing.

Eventually, he remembers that the city fire department had started billing for ambulance runs. The communications unit has no record of ambo calls for service going back more than a few weeks, but did the billing unit, by chance, keep records for longer?

He pulls a name and an address on Lennox Street.

“How the hell did you find me?” asks the mother as Zorzi comes through her door, notepad and pen akimbo.

“We got the mother,” I tell Rebecca minutes later, doing my best to make it sound inevitable. We were Baltimore’s newspaper, and we were writing about a kid who had terrorized Baltimore. And that kid had a mother. In Baltimore. Of course we got her.

As I say, it was not an important story or the best story. It doesn’t much matter to anyone past the Sunday when it ran. But it sits in my mind today as the moment when I was, if not living the life of kings, then at least among the princes of my city."

The next post will show the final sections, then my comments will follow in a post.

Columbia Journalism Review Analysis - Final Section

How Wide an Angle?

Simon does raise an interesting question about results-driven investigative journalism. It certainly improves the lives of some people, but reforms are often short-lived, the underlying patterns unyielding. Reform, in fact, is the theme of the third season of The Wire. In the main plotline, a renegade police major, tired of watching mass arrests make no perceptible impact on violent crime, secretly tries to legalize drugs in his district. He sets up three spots in the city where the police would not interfere with the sale or use of drugs, and violent crime goes down. Word of the plan leaks to reporters and politicians, who inevitably pounce on the controversy for their own good. When the police brass find out, the disgraced major goes out on a lieutenant’s pension.

The on-screen epigraph from the first episode of the season, a line taken from a street-level drug dealer, says it all: “Don’t matter how many times you get burnt, you just keep doin’ the same.” The episode opens with Baltimore’s mayor standing with his hand on a pump that, when depressed, will trigger the demolition of a high-rise building that had been a violent, drug-infested housing project. He proudly announces the construction of new low- and middle-income townhouses, then depresses the pump. The building comes down, and the dust escapes the established perimeter, slowly engulfing the surprised faces of all the politicians and glad-handers in attendance. The scene was unsubtle by Simon’s standards, but it was his marquee message: obsess over the smaller problems, and the bigger problems will blow right back in your face.

Will the thousands of additional children who learned to read in Baltimore after the “Reading by 9” series thrive into adulthood? The spotlight was on the schools, but much of what determines success in learning to read is learned at home before kindergarten. Once children get to school, well over half of the variance in their achievement scores is attributable to factors outside the schools. Perhaps 15 or 20 percent is attributable to teachers. And overall early gains by disadvantaged children often disappear by high school. (Coincidentally, in The Wire’s final season, this very fact will hamper a mayor’s effort to reform elementary schools.) Ought the spotlight shine on the extracurricular socioeconomic factors that interfere with learning?

A spotlight beamed higher and wider, however, may not effect any appreciable change. Is it a greater virtue to confront deeper truths about where our country is going and how successful we are at living up to the American ideal of equal opportunity than it is to improve individual lives? Should we keep doin’ the same, no matter how many times we get burnt?

Lynda Robinson, Simon’s colleague at the Sun, now an editor at The Washington Post Magazine, says that he was on the right track before he left nonfiction. The combination of systemic analysis and narrative, she says, is the highest form of journalism, and she cites reporters like Katherine Boo as examples of the “investigative-narrative” style. “You come out of it not just understanding why the system isn’t working, but caring and understanding the lives of people affected by it,” Robinson said. Jan Winburn, who is now delighted to have the title of narrative editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also mentions Boo’s work as a model. “Ironically,” she says, “a criticism of narrative is that you paint a picture of what’s happening, but don’t get at the root cause or explore the policy that causes that problem. The great reporters are bringing those two things together.”

Simon was careful not to hold up one or two examples as a model for his vision of journalism, saying more generally that he’d like to see “problems and people portrayed in all of their complexity and contrariness.” He feels reporters who want to understand the context of urban stories should read books that capture the complexity of social forces, such as Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land and William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears. Wilson’s tract, in fact, surveys the last forty years of media coverage of the underclass and convincingly laments its increasing focus on the “culture of poverty” at the expense of structural explanations.

At a 2006 Columbia Journalism School panel on “the crisis of boys,” economist Marcellus Andrews painted a picture similar to Simon’s: social forces that are too strong for individuals to push back against; a lack of skills and education that renders the underclass “redundant” as laborers; the only available jobs offering wages too low to support a family; schools providing an education too shoddy to enable the type of collective social mobility that could raise up a community; an illegitimate economy as the only solution for the underclass and an all-out war in response. “The ‘surplus male’ crisis shows up in the form of violence in streets,” Andrews said, and journalism fails to “show folks how they are pushed by unintentional forces.” He advised journalists to “give a sense of the hardness of this thing, a sense of the blood on the floor…so that when someone finishes reading the story they…will not succumb to simple-minded answers.” (At one point, I read a quote from Andrews to Simon—“the end of the American segregation system a half century ago put black people onto the blue-collar road to the middle class just when the on-ramp shut down”—and Simon perked up. “That’s it,” he said.)

Steve Luxenberg, who left his spot as the editor of the Washington Post’s Outlook section in February 2006 to write a book, knows something about deep inner-city reporting: he hired David Simon in 1983, and he edited “Rosa Lee’s Story,” Leon Dash’s immersion-reporting classic in The Washington Post in 1994. Luxenberg’s three decades as an editor—especially the generation that has passed since Dash’s epic story on the intergenerational transmission of poverty—have not made him sanguine about that type of reporting getting any more column inches.

Luxenberg said that newsroom priorities go through cycles. For instance, after Watergate and CIA abuses came to light, he said, “we talked with too much chest pounding about the public’s ‘right to know.’ That’s not a phrase you hear a heck of lot in newsrooms these days. I’m not saying newsrooms are bankrupt morally, but poverty is just not a discussion they’re having right now. Now it’s self-preservation.”

Triage

It is a bit of a false dichotomy to portray Simon’s vision of capturing complexity and Marimow’s and Carroll’s record of effecting change as competing philosophies. Ideally we would do both. But in an era of “self-preservation,” it’s getting harder to do either.

The real Baltimore Sun—on Calvert Street, not a soundstage—insists it is still trying to do both. In the downstairs lobby, pictures of H. L. Mencken and Sun founder A. S. Abell hang high on a wall with accompanying quotes. Abell chides visitors about partiality and the “common good,” while Mencken muses wistfully on what a lark reporting can be: “It is really the life of kings.” On a visit in September to see Sun editor Tim Franklin, his assistant, Rosie, found me in the lobby and cheerfully accompanied me up to the Sun’s buzzing newsroom. Franklin has an endearing midwestern affability and projects confidence straight across the room. He insisted his paper can do “quality” work with fewer resources.

“I want people to look at the Sun in ten years,” he said, “and say it did capture that snapshot of that time in the city’s history, that it chronicled lives in inner-city neighborhoods, and told stories through the eyes of people living it.” Franklin would consider the Sun a success if that happens. Sun reporters such as Julie Bykowicz, Annie Linskey, Stephen Kiehl, and Gus Sentementes have done vivid street-level reporting. Fred Schulte and June Arney exposed a colonial-era ground rent law that was being used to take homes away from thousands of city homeowners. Eric Siegel captured the complexity of urban blight in a brilliant series called “A Neighborhood Abandoned.” An affecting narrative by reporter Liz Bowie and photojournalist Andre Chung followed two homeless teens through their entire senior year of high school and received a passionate reaction from all levels of Baltimore society. “Let me first start off by saying I don’t read the newspaper,” wrote a nineteen-year-old student to the Sun in an e-mail. “Reading this story…made me look at life different.”

But as dedicated as the Sun’s reporters are, walls are falling down around them. Since Tribune Company took over in 2000, the Sun’s newsroom staff has declined from approximately four hundred to three hundred. (The Poynter Institute estimates that 3,500 newsroom jobs have been cut across the country during that time.) The Sun’s local newshole has shrunk.

In Simon’s eyes, “You do less with less and more with more,” he said. “That’s why they call it more.” When I brought up “A Neighborhood Abandoned,” Simon agreed that it was exemplary work, but then pointed out that writer Eric Siegel—a thirty-year Sun veteran and precisely the kind of reporter Simon believes newspapers need to hold on to—took the last buyout.

Simon is highly amused by an irony he perceives in the press’s reaction to corporations’ slashing of newsrooms: that newspaper editors are now making speeches about the same economic forces—the triumph of capital over labor—that the press has been ignoring in their own cities for years. “What they should have been covering is now biting them in the ass,” Simon said. “We’ll see it in season five: Guys, you’re a little late. It happened to you, and it happened to the entire working class.”

Simon, like Franklin, wants his portrayal of Baltimore to be judged against the future, but his idea of the future is darker. The Wire, he says, is about the decline of the American empire. It might have sprung from a journalistic impulse, but he says he has moved beyond simple reportage. “Consider it a big op-ed piece,” said Simon, “and consider it to be dissent. What I saw happen with the drug war, a series of political elections, and vague attempts at reform in Baltimore….What I saw happen to the Port of Baltimore, and what I saw happen to the Baltimore Sun—I think it’s all of a piece.” Should his premonition of the American empire’s future—more gated communities and more of a police state—come to pass and were someone to say he didn’t know it was coming, Simon said, it will at least be possible to pull The Wire off the shelf and say, “‘Don’t say you didn’t know this was coming. Because they made a fucking TV show out of it.’” 

Columbia Journalism Review Analysis - Part Two

One Layer Down

I highly advise that you never get between David Simon and John Carroll or Bill Marimow. Rafael Alvarez, a friend of Simon’s who wrote for The Wire and worked with him at the Sun, told me that exploring this difference—separating “the business end from the personal end,” as he said—would be exceedingly hard because the two are intertwined. “It’s like asking people about a divorce,” he said. “It’s very complicated.”

Carroll and Marimow are two of the most highly regarded journalists in the country. The Sun’s bold reporting and lively storytelling won praise from this very magazine in the late 1990s. Marimow won a Pulitzer as a reporter in Philly and his reporting led to another for the paper, and the Los Angeles Times won thirteen under Carroll’s leadership. If the possession of a Pulitzer means that one exemplifies the ideals of the profession, Simon is basically criticizing the entire world of newspapering.

He doesn’t always deliver that criticism with a light touch. In April, a friend of mine was scheduled to participate in a storytelling series called “The Stoop” at a Baltimore arts organization called Creative Alliance, and it turned out that Simon was on the bill, too, so I went. The theme was “My Nemesis,” and after six fantastic tales, Simon stepped to the stage in an untucked black shirt and jeans. “My nemesis,” Simon said graciously, “is whoever asked me to follow that up.” Simon then set up his own story. He described himself as a grudge-holder nonpareil, motivated only by an egotistical need to prove to people that they were wrong and he was right. “So naturally,” he said, “the place I needed to be was in journalism.” He was happy at the Sun, he told the full house, but then Marimow and Carroll came along.

Simon slammed their vision of journalism. He trashed the work they were most proud of, mocked their social graces, and dropped on them a generous payload of f-bombs. “Whenever they hear the word ‘Pulitzer,’ they become tumescent,” he said. Naming a nasty fourth season Wire character “Marimow” wasn’t enough, so Simon cast one-dimensional caricatures of Carroll and Marimow for the fifth season just to put a finger in their eyes.

The twist in the story, in Simon’s telling, is that when he heard about Carroll’s heroic stand at the Los Angeles Times and about Marimow’s recent bout with prostate cancer, he felt bad. And then, when his actors started filling out the characters as real, complex human beings, he realized his own smallness and pettiness. Good storytelling dictated that the season would have to fully develop the characters and confront the bigger issues currently facing journalism, not just irritate his old “asshole bosses.”

When I brought up this Creative Alliance tale with Simon, he distanced himself from it, taking pains to insist that The Wire is not a roman à clef. The Stoop story was full of hyperbole, he said; he had wanted to spin an outlandish story to help raise money for the nonprofit. “You caught me at a point at which I was really trying to be entertaining, and I hope that story came across as genuinely self-effacing,” he said. “It’s not as personal as I made it.”

After I interviewed Simon, I called John Carroll, hoping to get past any simplistic animosity and discover the more complex roots of their disagreement. Carroll was reluctant, but finally agreed to meet and requested that I send him stories Simon had used as examples of their differing journalistic approaches before we met. Marimow also agreed to talk as long as I read several Sun stories from the late 1990s.

Carroll has a face that belongs on a coin and a genteel, yet casual manner. I met him in late September at his Lexington, Kentucky, home. When I arrived, we chatted over coffee about a book he’s writing and his joy at returning to reporting after decades of editing. Then we went out to the back patio, where we spent several hours talking in nearly perfect weather about his career and his approach to journalism. A couple hours in, Carroll said, “I got from the Sun that humorous broadcast about how bad Bill and I were.” The Creative Alliance had been streaming an audio version of Simon’s story online for months, but Carroll only discovered it in the twenty-four hours since I had flown out of Baltimore after an interview with the Sun’s editors. In that small window of time, a flurry of activity had started. “I forwarded that to Marimow, by the way,” Carroll said. After the audio started floating around the newspaper world, e-mails to Carroll followed. A Los Angeles Times colleague wrote, “I’ve heard through the grapevine that there is a possibility of your being subjected to unjust criticism.” One of Marimow’s editors at The Philadelphia Inquirer sent a passionate two-pager: “There are legions of journalists—legions—who will stand up, speak the truth, and take this guy on….It’s as Martin Luther King put it, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

I suggested to Carroll that perhaps some of the contentiousness surrounding Simon’s departure could be explained by Alvarez’s divorce analogy, and I said I was trying to find a legitimate, substantive difference underneath. But the way Carroll saw it, Simon’s beef with his stewardship of the Sun was only one in a long trail of burned bridges. “Where has he ever worked that he didn’t rage at?” Carroll said. “University of Maryland? I talked with the dean yesterday.” While at The Diamondback, Simon had apparently talked trash about the school’s president. And now, Simon is “not speaking to the Sun, or at least some of them. I’ve got something on that,” Carroll said, handing me a faxed copy of an indignant, six-page letter Simon had written to the Sun’s public editor in August that began, “ALL THAT FOLLOWS IS NOT FOR PUBLICATION.”

Carroll seemed unfazed by Simon’s zingers at him in the Stoop story, but the comments about Marimow went too far for him. “Simon has a credible point of view about American society,” he said. “But he also, I think, has a need to hate. And I just think it’s unfair to Bill Marimow, who deserves it less than anyone I can think of.”

A few days later, I visited Marimow at the Inquirer, where he recently returned as the top editor. He hotly defended Carroll as a gentleman and a stellar journalist. “He owes John an apology,” Marimow said. “He really does.” Marimow didn’t find the Stoop story self-effacing. “At the end,” Marimow said, “where he says, ‘Well I really feel sorry for Bill because he had prostate cancer, and I don’t want him to die’….To me all that stuff is utter, unmitigated bullshit. It’s cowardly, it’s dishonorable, and it’s nettlesome. I’d never say that about anybody.”

I passed along Simon’s assurance that he had exaggerated and that the show is fictional, and Marimow suggested I talk to Mike Leary, a new managing editor at the Inquirer who had just left the Sun. Leary, he said, was in the room with Simon when he had negotiated with the Sun for rights to the name and facilities. Leary told me that in those conversations, Simon disclosed that the upcoming season would indeed feature characters based on Carroll and Marimow.

Many other former colleagues of Carroll and Marimow—including admirers of Simon’s work—went on background to warn me of Simon’s bitterness. One former Sun editor praised Marimow and Carroll and then warned me: “You don’t want your name on a story you’re going to regret five years from now.”

In October, I met again with Simon at a coffee shop in Manhattan. Regarding the portrayal of former colleagues in The Wire, he said he is entitled to make fiction from his own memories. The show, he says, is allegorical, meant to address all American cities, not just Baltimore, and the journalism industry as a whole. And Simon claims the upcoming season will show a great affection for his craft and his alma mater. He cast about twenty Sun alums in small parts, and the first episode will simply be a validation of the craft: the city editor—the “conscience” of the newsroom for this season, says Simon—pounces on a good story and gets it in the paper. He said 70 percent of the underlying criticism will be about downsizing. It won’t, he said, be “fighting some forlorn battle over shit that happened in the newsroom fifteen years ago.”

Simon disparaged Carroll’s and Marimow’s “ad hominem” attacks on him in the press and pulled out a copy of The New Yorker that had come out the day before. There was an 11,000-word profile of Simon in the issue, and he flipped through to find two quotes. In the first, Marimow says Simon’s “obsession” with Carroll’s regime is “as monomaniacal as Captain Ahab.” In the second, Carroll says Simon disdains anyone else who succeeds at police reporting. It was a psychological issue, Carroll said, and he pointed to the scoreboard: “Bill Marimow won two Pulitzers as a police reporter; David won zero.” As Simon sees it, Carroll and Marimow refuse to debate him on the substance and resort to bunk psychoanalysis.

“The things they valued in journalism—management, not my colleagues—I do not value,” Simon says. “The things I valued in journalism, they did not have regard for.”

Two Layers Down

For Simon, this dispute basically comes down to the complexity of urban problems. As he sees it, the “Philly model,” imported to the Sun by Carroll and Marimow, ignored the decades of economic, racial, political, and social disconnects underlying that complexity. When it spurred reform, it was reform that could not match the intransigence of the underlying patterns. The reporting itself was formidable, Simon says, but to him, homelessness, addiction, and violence aren’t the central problems. “Those are all the symptoms of the problem,” he says. “You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that’s kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.”

As an example, he cited a 1994 Sun story about an alcoholic whose “enthrallment with dope and booze…brought him Social Security disability checks for ‘chronic alcoholism.’” The article noted that Social Security was doling out over $1 billion a year to 200,000 addicts and alcoholics, and it was published during the push for reform that eventually spurred President Clinton to “end welfare as we know it” in 1996 with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Simon said the Sun story was simplistic; it had a villain, fraud, and the possibility of reform. “A lot of people were getting SSI [Supplemental Security Income] checks and maybe weren’t truly disabled,” he said. “That’s a nice, tasty little thing you can bite off and win a prize with.”

Social Security eventually proposed a $300 million plan to purge the Supplemental Security Income rolls of those using their checks, as the Sun put it in a follow-up article, to “drink and drug themselves to death at taxpayers’ expense.” That article did note the irony that the plan’s funding could have bought a year of residential treatment for 15,000 addicts. But Simon still felt it lacked enough context of mid-1990s welfare reform. He pointed out that as state social workers watched traditional welfare being pared down in those days, they began deliberately pushing welfare recipients onto the disability rolls out of concern for their…well, their welfare. Simon said that without an SSI check, many people would have been starving, disability or not. He wanted to see the Sun address the wider context of welfare reform, to capture how it was “landing in the street,” to show who was falling between the cracks as the safety net was redesigned. The Sun, Simon believed, had written a simplistic story: “Nobody’s minding the store at SSI.”

“One story is small, self-contained, and has good guys and bad guys,” Simon said. “The other one is about where we are and where we’re going as an urban society and who’s being left behind, and it’s harder to report.”

Part of the problem with stories like this, Simon says, is the Sun had killed off its poverty beat in the early 1990s. (Several former Sun reporters brought this up independent of Simon.) To write intelligently about the complexity of urban society, Simon said, reporters need to know not only their beat inside and out, but possess an awareness of social and economic trends “over years, if not decades.” When new reporters take on a story like this, Simon said, they are not “constrained by history.”

The crucible moment for Simon was a disagreement over “The Metal Men,” a story that followed two addicts as they scavenged the city for piping, roofing—anything, really—to sell to scrap-metal yards that were all too willing to look the other way. It was exactly where Simon was going: tying an intimate portrait of desperate people in a blighted neighborhood to the same economic system that propels the rest of us along so smoothly. Here’s how the story ends:

Grant them, at least, some small due for creating wealth by destroying wealth, for going beyond the stereotype that says a dope fiend stands on a corner all day, scratching and nodding. Hard work doesn’t scare a metal man. “Sometimes,” says Gary, “getting high is the toughest job there is.”

Simon claims that Carroll spiked the story. Jan Winburn, an editor Carroll had recruited to improve the paper’s narrative journalism, says she convinced Carroll to print the piece, and it ran on the front of the Sunday magazine. But Simon had reached a breaking point. Since returning from book leave, Simon had grown increasingly alienated. At the wine-and-dine “salons” management had convened to discuss how to “make the Sun great,” Simon says he was appalled to hear reporters trashed by name. He had been rejected when he proposed a series on race. He also thought his book reporting made him more valuable to the paper, and that he deserved a higher raise than what Marimow was offering (he insists it was not about the money but recognition). There was a buyout on the table, and he had a standing offer for work on the television adaptation of Homicide. He took the buyout.

John Carroll remembers things differently, though not as clearly—he hasn’t been thinking about David Simon as much as David Simon has been thinking about him. First, regarding the SSI story, Carroll says fraud is fraud. He didn’t want to see every pathology in American society squeezed into one story, and he thinks a newspaper should write about fraud upon learning of it. “In my mind,” he said, “if you want to have public support for government social programs, those programs have to do what they say they’re for….You’ll end up with fewer social-service programs if you take the attitude that they’re just there to be ripped off for a higher purpose.”

“The Metal Men” was symptomatic to Carroll, too, but in a different way than for Simon. Carroll had found it to be too similar to the reporting Simon was doing for The Corner at a time when he felt too many Sun reporters were using the newspaper as a base for their book-writing careers. “When you’re in a downsizing business,” Carroll said, “you have to make some pretty tough decisions in favor of people there everyday knocking themselves out for the paper.” (Simon vehemently protested this, saying he did original reporting with mostly newfound sources.) Carroll also doesn’t remember spiking “The Metal Men.” “If I did,” he said, “maybe I provided the antidote by hiring Jan Winburn.” Landing on the front of the Sunday magazine, he said, must have been a vote of confidence.

But Bill Marimow thought “The Metal Men” ennobled the thieves who were stripping the city of its infrastructure, regardless of whether the subjects recognized the truth of their lives on the page. And when I went to see him in his glass-walled office at the Inquirer, he gave me a stack of stories that demonstrated his passion for urban issues. All had resulted in reforms, he said, that bettered the lives of the very people David Simon reported on with such zeal: a deeply reported chronicle of cops indiscriminately unleashing poorly trained K-9 dogs on unarmed blacks; an exposé of a judge moonlighting as a slumlord; coverage of fifty-two children dying “needlessly” because of the failure of Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services.

Marimow felt he was covering not only the symptoms, but the roots of urban problems. A story about students assaulting teachers was followed by a story about the failure of a special-education program. That article suggested that the assaulted teachers had been at risk because many of the attackers had previously been mishandled by special-education programs and then sent into regular classrooms. “This has nothing to do with Pulitzer Prizes,” Marimow said. “It has everything to do with: my wife’s a teacher, I’m hypersensitive to this, and I wanted to transcend symptoms to causes and solutions.”

Carroll felt he had addressed the complexity as well. A Pulitzer-winning Los Angeles Times story about problems at a hospital serving a black neighborhood addressed the subtle racial dynamics that held the city’s leadership back from demanding improvements. According to the article, the hospital was literally killing patients. But because it was staffed with many black doctors and had been the pride of black Los Angeles since just after the Watts riots, it could not be criticized; it had become a third rail to both white and black leaders. The Los Angeles Times stepped on that rail, and Carroll believes it saved lives. Carroll also handed me “Enrique’s Journey,” a gripping narrative of a Honduran boy who endured countless bitter hardships to rejoin his mother in America. Here, Carroll argued, was a disproportionate amount of a newspaper’s resources spent to penetrate the story of an impoverished part of America that few of us understand.

You might argue—especially if you’re David Simon—that there are broader economic and social forces at work in all these stories, that black hospitals in many cities will continue to have problems, that poor children will continue to die needlessly, that immigrant families will continue to be fractured. And this is where the difference emerges between Simon’s broad sociological approach and the rifle-shot approach taken by Carroll and Marimow, and rewarded all over the country by the Pulitzer board: the latter approach demonstrably affects—possibly even saves—individual lives.

“I don’t think a paper can necessarily take on all the complex issues that go into blighted neighborhoods and blighted lives,” Carroll says. “To try to do every factor, you’ll dissipate your energy and not really give attention to any one factor.” Carroll offered the school system as an example. There could be fifty topics worth writing about, he says, such as unions protecting bad teachers, wasteful bureaucracy at the board of education, and unsafe schools. “If you do all fifty,” he says, “you won’t do anything well enough to have an impact.”

At the Sun, Carroll and Marimow took on education, asking themselves what the real vital sign of a school system is. When they read that children rarely catch up if they don’t learn to read by third grade, they started a series called “Reading by 9.” “We’ll continue to try and cover everything,” Carroll said. “But let’s pick one thing and hammer the living hell out of it.” The spotlight was unrelenting: the paper regularly posted reading scores for every school in the city, and there were dozens of articles over several years.

This isn’t to say Carroll doesn’t support Simon’s vision of journalism. “I admire that kind of reporting,” he says, “telling what’s going on in these areas by going there and dealing with the full complexity of it….But you’ve got to be really good at telling it.” Without the talent, he argues, you can’t tackle that kind of reporting, and that kind of talent “doesn’t grow on trees.

“I know it’s a monumental economic and moral issue,” he says of the underclass and increasing inequality. “But what is the solution? I don’t know. I myself would be very happy to pay more in taxes even though I pay a lot. To do my share to make it a country in which everyone has insurance, an opportunity for a job, everyone has the right to a living wage….I agree with his cause, basically. I think he’s a bit of a head case, but he’s smart, creative, and on the subject of race and class in America, he’s on the side of the angels.”

But Carroll insists that it’s worth it to push harder on more discrete issues. “I don’t doubt that thousands of children learned to read because of that unwavering spotlight,” Carroll says. “Did it solve the problem of inadequate schools, poverty, racism, or other issues that are so intractable in the city? No. But it did some good for some people.”

Don't Listen to Me, Listen To...

In this case, the Columbia Journalism Review and writer Lawrence Lanahan. Lanahan elaborates on the statistical truths behind Baltimore's crime and drug numbers, its neighborhood division, and why David Simon and his former Baltimore Sun colleagues - John Carroll and Bill Marimow - will probably never agree on how to cover the drugs, violent crime, education, politics, etc. that The Wire address.

This is a great analysis because it gives all sides some airtime and in this case, I think they each deserve it. They agree in principle about these urban issues, just not about how to cover and defeat them.

I can thank the same professor who introduced me to the show years ago for also forwarding me this article within the last couple days. We still discuss this show each time we see each other. It's kind of a cult, it seems. Scary, huh?

I'll post the article in parts, as it is quite long. If you'd like to view the whole thing at once, feel free to at http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/secrets_of_the_city.php?page=all

Here is Lawrence Lanahan's analysis:

Secrets of the City

What The Wire reveals about urban journalism

By Lawrence Lanahan

Baltimore via Wide Angle

High up on a pole, under a police decal spelling out CITIWATCH and a flashing blue light, the security camera on Calverton Road captures something unusual on the streets of west Baltimore this bright summer morning—a man in a suit standing at a podium. It’s election time, and for Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr., a candidate for mayor, this corner symbolizes the city’s biggest concern: crime. He stands in front of Club International, where five months earlier a pair of patrons who had been kicked out for urinating on the dance floor are accused of returning with a gun to murder the bouncer. Baltimore—already legendary for violent crime—has seen a 14 percent increase in homicides and a 24 percent increase in nonfatal shootings over the same period in 2006. On July 30, a man who had been shot just blocks from Mayor Sheila Dixon’s house approached her security detail for help. Four weeks later, a man shot while driving his SUV plowed through a concrete wall and met his maker at the bottom of a swimming pool in the back yard of Baltimore’s most famous defense attorney, Warren Brown.

Passing buses occasionally drown out Mitchell’s amplified words, but through the clamor his solution emerges: four hundred extra police officers and a 15 percent raise for the whole force. More murder? More cops. A simple problem. A simple solution. Yet on the corner across the street from the hubbub, where I’m standing with several residents, the situation seems more complicated than that. Everyone starts talking at once: how hard it is to pay for utilities and prescriptions on a fixed income; how few after-school programs, libraries, and summer jobs are left; how promised playgrounds and recreation centers never arrive; how the media only show the neighborhood in a negative light; how the politicians only come around when they’re trying to get elected.

The further back I step, the sadder the scene looks. Mitchell is talking to three television cameras, a handful of reporters, and another man in a suit, and from this perspective, the wider concrete and asphalt desolation just swallows them.

It could be a scene from The Wire, particularly this year. The fifth and final season of David Simon’s dramatic HBO series will focus on the newsroom of a fictional paper called, like the real one, the Sun. The Wire, although fictional, explores an increasingly brutal and coarse society through the prism of Baltimore, where postindustrial capitalism has decimated the working-class wage and sharply divided the haves and have-nots. The city’s bloated bureaucracies sustain the inequality. The absence of a decent public-school education or meaningful political reform leaves an unskilled underclass trapped between a rampant illegal drug economy and a vicious “war on drugs.” In the final season, Simon asks why we aren’t getting the message. Why can’t we achieve meaningful reform? What are we telling ourselves about ourselves? To get at these questions, he wants us to see the city from the perspective of a shrinking newsroom.

Back in 1983, Simon was thrilled to land a job at the Sun. He says he had been an ink-stained-wretch-in-waiting ever since he was twelve, when his father—a former newsman himself—took him to a production of The Front Page. Simon joined his high school paper and later became editor-in-chief of The Diamondback at the University of Maryland. While he was in college, he says, he filed so many stories as a suburban stringer for the Sun that he was forced to graduate more than a year late. Then suddenly there he was: a full-time gig in the house of Mencken and Manchester. He had an enormous respect for the Sun, and he pounded his beat eagerly.

The job lasted twelve years, and Simon became increasingly disillusioned toward the end. In 1995, he angrily ditched the Sun and went to television, where he dedicated himself to telling the world how screwed up it was, layer by layer. And now he turns his eye back to journalism, giving us something to ponder: Why is a newspaperman-at-heart devoting the final ten hours of one of the most acclaimed television dramas in history to the role of journalism in the decline of the American empire?

A Story Without a Villain

The offices of Simon’s Blown Deadline Productions sit on an isolated waterfront street in Canton, a historically working-class Baltimore neighborhood. Canton’s brick factories now house retail stores and condos, but Simon’s office is in the one section where there is still active industry. Across the harbor, the Port of Baltimore’s epic blue cranes gleam in the sun.

Fans of The Wire would recognize these cranes from the second season, a rumination on the decline of the working class, set at a stevedores’ union. The first season focused tightly on a wiretap investigation of a major drug organization, as if it were a police procedural. But the addition of the union revealed Simon’s true intent: he was building a city. By the end of season two, he had explored the criminal-justice system, the drug organizations, and the port. The third season added city hall, the churches, and the public-health sector. The fourth season added the school system, academia, nonprofits, and the inner-city family.

Simon was writing a televised novel, and a big one. Innumerable subplots came and went, and main characters disappeared from the show for several episodes at a time. Nothing ever resolved itself in an hour, and there were no good guys or bad guys. All were individuals constrained by their institutions, driven to compromise between conscience, greed, and ambition. Facets of their characters emerged slowly over time. They spoke in the sometimes-unintelligible vernaculars of their subcultures. All of this made unprecedented demands on viewers and provided an immense reward to those who stuck around. A righteous anger at the failure of our social institutions drives The Wire, but the passionate ideas that fuel it are hidden several layers down.

In early September, I visited Simon’s office in Canton. The crew had just wrapped filming on the final episode, and the lobby was cluttered with boxes and plastic-wrapped wardrobe. Simon arrived wearing a black-and-white Hawaiian shirt and Ray-Bans pushed back over his bald head. He took coffee orders from his staff, and we drove to a nearby Starbucks. Mardi Gras beads dangled from Simon’s rearview mirror, and Liam Clancy and Thelonious Monk played on the stereo.

This was Simon at ease. He has a great sense of humor and loves a good yarn. But when we sat down at a conference table to talk about his career at the Sun, Simon was taut and focused, sometimes twisting a paper clip or drawing perfect 3-D boxes on a legal pad. He is still passionate about journalism, and when his frustrations surface he uncorks a blue streak worthy of his fictionalized detectives and drug dealers.

When the Sun hired Simon immediately out of college, he didn’t know Baltimore at all, and the cop beat would not have been his choice, but he worked his tail off. “I filed three hundred bylines in my first year,” Simon says. And though he was green, his colleagues found him fully formed as a reporter and a writer. “He was writing about the sociology of the city through the prism of the cop beat and the criminal-justice system,” says Rebecca Corbett, his first editor, now an editor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. “And he fairly uniquely looked at the people who we tend to view just as victims or bad guys, and looked at these neighborhoods as real places that we had better understand.”

Simon began to hit his stride after a five-part series in 1987 on notorious drug lord “Little Melvin” Williams. (Williams, five years out of prison, now plays a deacon on The Wire.) Then he asked Police Commissioner Edward Tilghman if he could spend a year shadowing the homicide department for a book. Surprisingly, Tilghman said yes, as did Simon’s editors, and in 1988 Simon took fifteen months off to report Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991.

That same year, The Times Mirror Company, which had bought the Sun from the A. S. Abell Co. in 1986, lured John Carroll away from the Lexington Herald-Leader to edit the Sun. “The paper had problems that needed to be solved,” Simon says, and he was excited to see Carroll come on board. Carroll’s stellar reputation as a protégé of Gene Roberts at The Philadelphia Inquirer had preceded him, and Simon believed that the Sun would have the ingredients—Sun veterans, talented new hires, new leadership, and flush finances—to produce first-class journalism.

In 1993, Simon took a second book leave, this time to observe the war on drugs from one of the roughest neighborhoods in Baltimore for The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, which he co-wrote with retired Baltimore homicide detective and current Wire co-producer Ed Burns. Shortly after Simon left, Carroll brought in Bill Marimow, a colleague from the Inquirer, as metro editor at the Sun, and Marimow quickly rose to managing editor. Out on the streets, Simon was developing a fuller vision of where he wanted to go as a journalist. The cops and crime beat, it turned out, was the best thing that ever happened to him, and he thought that his two year-long, book-reporting excursions had revealed deeper truths about why the city was the way it was. He felt ready to address its complexity.

Simon returned briefly from book leave to write a four-part series called “Crisis in Blue” for the Sun, about a dysfunctional police department. At the time, Baltimore had registered a record number of homicides the previous year, and a new police commissioner was about to take the helm of a department in decline. It was a sprawling subject, but Simon found the numbers to focus and quantify it: crime was up 37 percent, yet arrest rates were down for violent crime because the felony divisions had been depleted to fill the ranks at homicide. Simon captured the qualitative nuance through his deep reservoir of sources in the department and on the street: robbery victims who never heard back from the police; a junkie rotating from the corner to the courthouse five times in six months only to receive a verdict of probation before judgment; detectives who advocated for a unit to target violent drug rings only to get transferred because they had deviated from the street-level arrest orthodoxy. Simon had the historical grasp to show the progression from a well-respected department full of disciplined Vietnam veterans through twenty years of “planned attrition” to a disorganized, underpaid force that was moonlighting to pay the bills. His sociological eye caught the systemic flaws in a futile drug war: a patrol cop collecting court pay for six cases in one day while his collars walked out with probation; the irony of the fact that neighborhood activists’ demands to clean up the corners led to mass arrests of users while the repeat offenders who brought the drugs to town and did the murders walked free.

For an exposé of a failing police department, “Crisis in Blue” is remarkably free of villains. The reader finds not just individual actors making bad decisions, but a fatally flawed system that those actors struggle to accommodate. Reporting from the front lines of the war on drugs taught Simon everything he needed to know about that system. “How can you report on a place like Baltimore, where one of every two black males is without work,” he said, “and in any way regard the economic structure as being viable?”

A ‘Rule for the New Millennium’

The outline of Baltimore’s decline can be seen in the numbers. Over the last thirty years or so, the city lost 28 percent of its population, and manufacturing jobs declined from 20 percent of available work to 8 percent. In 2006, 19.5 percent of Baltimoreans lived in poverty, and, as of 2000, 43.4 of blacks were absent from the labor force (the city is 64.4 percent black). Poverty is a fact of life for 22.9 percent of blacks, 30.6 percent of black children, and almost half of all female-headed black households with children five years old and younger. Only 35 percent of Baltimore students graduate high school within four years. It has the nation’s second highest increase in new aids cases. A massive drug economy serves an estimated 50,000 addicts, and there are roughly that number of vacant housing units. And Baltimore’s 2006 homicide rate of 43.3 per 100,000 residents was one of the highest in the country, behind only five cities, including New Orleans and Detroit.

The difference between, say, west Baltimore’s Boyd-Booth neighborhood and Roland Park in leafy north Baltimore is shocking. According to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, the juvenile arrest rate in Boyd-Booth’s census statistical area is 206 per 1,000 residents. In Roland Park, it’s 1.6. All the comparisons are staggering. Median household income: $23,070 to $64,571. Percent of employed working-age adults: 46.1 to 76.1. Domestic violence rate per 1,000: 68 to 1.9. Median home sale price: $33,750 to $235,000. Percent of residential properties that are vacant: 19.9 to 0.1. Absentee rate in tenth grade: 81.5 percent to 16.7 percent. Teen birth rate per 1,000: 117 to 0.

Baltimore cannot be replicated: the liberating weirdness, the lunch-pail ethic of the Colts and Cal Ripken, the peculiar conversations of hundreds of barfly-savants, the seafood, the accents….It’s a lovable city. It really is. Nonetheless, it is two cities. More than one former Sun reporter gave me the same spiel: You can live in Roland Park, drive down St. Paul Street to your office at Legg Mason or T. Rowe Price, and life is sweet. But go several blocks to the east or west, and the “Land of Pleasant Living” quickly becomes “Bodymore, Murdaland.”

It’s not quite fair, however, to lump all of blighted east and west Baltimore together. It is still a city of neighborhoods, and there are nuances. Many people still love the place. The corner of Baltimore and Calverton, for instance, where mayoral candidate Keiffer Mitchell spoke of decay, was recently a symbol of renewal. The neighborhood, Boyd-Booth, was typical of Baltimore’s early 1990s heroin-and-murder-driven nadir. But using a new law against “nuisance properties” and a plan implemented by a coalition of police and community groups, this neighborhood achieved a 52 percent reduction in violent crime and an 80 percent decrease in drug arrests from 1993 to 1995.

The complex Baltimore of Boyd-Booth is the Baltimore that Simon has chosen to document, and his reporting on the streets revealed to him the “wire” that eventually informed The Wire: it threads through both “our” lives and “their” lives. Simon believes that we’ve agreed as a country that our economy can thrive without 8 to 10 percent of the population. Thus, in his view, those without the education and skills to get by are inevitably going to turn to the only viable economy in their neighborhoods—the drug trade. To contain that problem and its attendant violence, he believes, the war on drugs has morphed into a war on the underclass. In both the viable and unviable America, Simon argues, capital is more valued than human lives, whether you’re an expendable tout in a drug organization, a cop trying to put good police work over statistics, a stevedore trying to pull in a full week of union wages, a teacher trying to educate rather than teach to the test, or, as the new season of The Wire argues, a reporter trying to capture the complexity of urban life rather than haul in sound bites.

In March 1995, Simon finished his work on The Corner and returned to the Sun. He began writing narratives from the point of view of his subjects, judging his own work on whether a subject would recognize the truth of his life on the page. “I admire journalism where I actually see a nuanced world with complex human beings captured,” Simon says. Journalism, he thinks, should bring “real life and real issues through the keyhole” in a way that leads to “meaningful thought, if not action.”

But Simon wouldn’t achieve his ideal at the Sun. In May 1995, Times Mirror installed former General Mills executive Mark Willes as CEO. When Times Mirror bought the Sun in 1986, the chain was regarded as fairly benign, but when the “Cereal Killer,” as Willes came to be known, gave a speech to reporters on Calvert Street “about product and product share,” Simon lost hope. “We sat there listening, thinking, ‘Is this guy going to mention the elemental public trust?’”

To Simon, the indifferent logic of Wall Street has poisoned the relationship between newspapers and their cities. Simon says he only sees two fixes: some kind of quasi-public business model, and some new way for newspapers to charge for all the content they deliver free on the Internet. But then he adds one more: “Third would be that nobody thinks about winning a prize until December 1. Because if that thought is in your head prior to the end of the year, about what you need to do to win a prize, you’re an asshole, and you’re part of the problem.”

What he sees as a prize mentality is what ultimately drove Simon from the Sun. To him, the institution was being corrupted from within as well as without. Although Simon considers John Carroll’s 2005 stand against corporate cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times to have been noble, the Carroll-Marimow reign at the Sun had increasingly enraged him. Simon saw their approach as a formula for winning Pulitzer Prizes: “Surround a simple outrage, overreport it, claim credit for breaking it, make sure you find a villain, then claim you effected change as a result of your coverage. Do it in a five-part series, and make sure you get ‘the Baltimore Sun has learned’ in the second graph.”

Simon believes that approach is reductive, giving complex problems the illusion of simplicity. Just six months after returning from book leave, Simon packed his bags, having absorbed what he calls his “rule for the new millennium”: any institution will eventually betray those who serve it and those it is meant to serve. He definitely included Carroll and Marimow’s prize-winning Sun. He used the word “venal.”
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I'll post the next section later today.