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.”