The Wire vs. The Sun

The most controversial season of TV's best drama comes to a close

The fifth and final season of The Wire concluded Sunday night. Until this year critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for the Baltimore-based HBO series, but the last 10 episodes provoked furious debates between the program's defenders and detractors. The chief cause of the ferment was the show's critique of the newspaper where Wire creator David Simon began his career: the Baltimore Sun.

I'm not going to join the argument about the season's artistic merit—not here, anyway. I do have a few thoughts about the substance of Simon's criticisms. I might not have a front-row seat at the paper, but I'm not squinting from the back row either: I subscribe to The Sun, my wife is a reporter there, and our circle of friends includes several current and former Sun staffers, some of whom had cameos on The Wire this year. (Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions. They are not necessarily shared by anyone who happens to be married to me.)

Here is Simon's critique, conveniently summarized in an essay for the March Esquire:

[W]hen 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.

Note that this is not the familiar liberal narrative of newspaper decline. In the standard story, like Simon's story, short-sighted media companies cut the meat out of powerful papers. But in the usual account, those "impact" stories are the missing meat and the editors who assign them—in The Sun's case, John Carroll and Bill Marimow—are the heroes standing up for journalistic "excellence."

For Simon, by contrast, Carroll and Marimow are a central part of the problem. Their stand-ins on his show are sanctimonious blowhards; their prize-hungry journalism is a substitute for the real thing. Their quest for "impact" brings to mind Ivan Illich's opening to Deschooling Society, with its disdain for the confusion of "process" with "substance," its ire at a world where "Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends." It's the same problem The Wire decries in policework and schooling, where decaying bureaucracies defend their performance by jacking up meaningless statistics.

I don't agree with all of Simon's take. It's hard to believe, for example, that many papers could have kept themselves relevant while hiding their best online material behind a pay wall. And the focus on cutbacks qua cutbacks seems off. The problem with The Sun isn't that it's cutting back; it's that it's so thoughtless about where it cuts. The Wire made a big deal about The Sun's disappearing international bureaus. (Eight years ago, it had outposts in five foreign countries. Now it has none.) But I would be happy to see the paper bring its overseas correspondents home if it would reinvest those resources in covering the city.

Instead, The Sun—which managed to find the money for an expensive redesign hated by virtually every reader in the metro area—no longer maintains a beat for each of the city's major regions. Now it has just one reporter covering urban neighborhoods. It has been closing its suburban offices, eliminating its Carroll County bureau last year and losing its Baltimore County base last month. (The former county is growing rapidly, and half or more of the paper's readers live in the latter.) When the Baltimore County staff moved to the paper's downtown headquarters, a company spokesperson told the local alt-weekly that the reporters are "not in their office most of the time anyway. They can go out to Glen Burnie or Reisterstown from here just as quick as they could from Towson."

For those of you who don't live around here: It is extremely unlikely that a Baltimore County reporter will have to cover anything in Glen Burnie, since Glen Burnie is in Anne Arundel County. To get from the old Baltimore County office in Towson to Glen Burnie, you must first move around or across an obscure little burg called the City of Baltimore. The fact that it is possible to be a spokeswoman for The Sun without knowing this speaks volumes.

This rupture between the paper and the region it covers is at the heart of Simon's critique, and it's here that I agree with him the most. It's striking how much of The Sun's coverage of Baltimore—especially, but not exclusively, the blacker, poorer parts of Baltimore—are written as though the subject is an alien landscape. But it shouldn't be surprising.

There are basically two ways to get hired at The Sun. The standard method is to learn your craft at a series of smaller papers around the country. The other approach is to come directly to the paper from an elite university. The Sun has found a lot of fine journalists through these routes (especially the first one). But there used to be a third road to the paper: from the city itself, getting started as a copy boy or some other low-level position and gradually working your way up the ladder.

It's valuable to have a number of Baltimore-bred correspondents who developed their skills and discovered their city at the same time. They have accumulated a wealth of local knowledge that can't easily be replaced. Not only is this now essentially closed as a path to the paper, but the reporters who entered the building this way, along with other experienced hands, have been leaving as the newspaper hires cheaper but greener outsiders to replace them. There are solid reasons not to staff a newspaper only with native talent, but there are solid reasons as well to make sure they're part of the mix—perhaps even for a special local outreach effort to find the next generation of copy boys made good. But that isn't part of the professional culture of old-media journalism, at The Sun or anywhere else.

This isn't intended as a nostalgic argument for bygone days. In some ways American journalism is better than it has ever been: There are more outlets to choose from, more ways to start an outlet of your own, more eyes monitoring the outlets' output for errors, omissions, and lies. The larger mediasphere has grown more open to outside voices, even if specific channels like The Sun have grown more insular and removed. For many topics, though not nearly enough, this means not just more commentary but more actual reporting.

But that makes it all the more important that a paper respond to that competition by doing the things an urban newspaper is best suited to do. And that means intimate, collaborative coverage of a city by people who know it well. The major problem with The Sun is that it doesn't seem to know what to do with the knowledge it has stored within its walls, and that it doesn't seem to have noticed how much of that knowledge has already slipped out its doors.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Comments

[The Skipper]

‘Gilligan’s’ Mary Ann caught with dope

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080311/ap_on_en_tv/people_dawn_wells_3

[TB]

As a former non-Sun Trib Co. employee, I agree with Jesse in full. Who needs the Baltimore (or Hartford!) perspective from Paris, when you already have umpteen reporters from other papers’ (LA, Chi, LI) bureaus. By the same token, you need to use those savings to get MORE local.

The Wire illustrates this by having an entire bloody gang war go unremarked (especially Omar’s death), because no one was watching and no one knew the players.

Overall, the show is a great piece of drama and a thoroughly libertarian critique of the power of institutions and power.

[TB]

make that last line:

thoroughly libertarian critique of institutions and power.

[x,y]

Most of The Wire critcisms I’ve read this year are bunk and result directly from the fact that the show took on the Sun. “But that’s not what a newspaper is really like!” they howl. See Slate’s coverage of the last season for an excellent example of this. To this I say:

1. It’s fiction (based in large part on real facts, but fiction nonetheless).

2. Get a grip. You’re not that important and we (most watchers who don’t write for a living) could care less about how real or fake the newsroom scenes are.

[stephen the goldberger]

As a wire fanatic I say the last season was by far the most disapointing, and it has almost entirely to do with its focus on the Sun.

I care about journalistic integrity, but couldnt you have done a better job showing its downfall than the tired Jayson Blair/Stephen Glass story. Shattered Glass showed the same storyline, infinitely better. A lot of the scenes seemed overly sanctimonious.

Simon should have taken a step back, and said ok. What do newspaper readers REALLY care about when it comes to understanding the media and how it operates?

Also the whole expose of the shallowness of the modern mass media is old tired ground. I understand. Ok?

[edna]

i fondly remember the days when the sun was a world-class paper- papers, really, the morning and evening editions were totally different.

now, it’s faceless and stunningly bland.

[zig zag man]

“‘Gilligan’s’ Mary Ann caught with dope.

This is the best reason ever to stop the war on some drugs, even Mary Ann smokes pot.

/Mary Ann over Ginger

//I blame Bob Denver’s ghost.

[Jose Ortega y Gasset]

I have worked with Sun reporters for years, disclosing my bias.

The Sun generally sucks. Middle management is bloated. There are far too many editors; far too few reporters. The paper is all too prone to pissing contests, presumably to maintain some semblence of relevance. Pulling the metro area/regional desks like the adjoining counties was sheer stupidity and precipated a drop in circulation. In an era where print journalism is struggling, the Sun is like an hefty Baltimore “hon” thrashing about wildly in a local quarry, eventually leaving nothing but a multi-colored oil slick of cheap makeup on the water’s surface.

[Eric D. Dixon]

What little of Slate’s criticism of “The Wire” I actually read seemed pretty misguided to me — one comment in particular. They thought it wasn’t realistic that Gus would use such a cliched phrase as “if it bleeds, it leads,” but that’s *exactly* the type of thing an old-school editor might say sarcastically, with wearied resignation — the way Gus said it on the show.

Anyway, lest I end up picking nits off a nit, all I really have to say is that the fictional Sun newsroom felt like a realistic newsroom to me, based on the couple I’ve worked in…

[Paul]

There are more outlets to choose from, more ways to start an outlet of your own, more eyes monitoring the outlets’ output for errors, omissions, and lies.

And that, right there, is the core complaint with many of the media elite. They don’t feel elite like they used to. Too many people in pajamas critiquing their work. And we can’t have that, now, can we?

[LarryA]

(Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions. They are not necessarily shared by anyone who happens to be married to me.)

I feel for you, Jesse. I have the same situation.

But that makes it all the more important that a paper respond to that competition by doing the things an urban newspaper is best suited to do. And that means intimate, collaborative coverage of a city by people who know it well.

Bingo. Here where I live the major complaint of the almost-daily newspaper is not enough local news. Most of what it prints comes off the AP wire. About a year ago I was in their office for something and overheard their family editor on the phone getting directions from someone having an event. The editor was asking how to get to the premier country club in the newspaper’s coverage area. That story’s still echoing around the higher social circles.

The response is a new weekly that covers all the local stories. Actually, it’s a paper with one reporter (my wife) who writes almost everything that goes in it except sports. City council, several school boards, county commissioners, features, founding family histories for our sesquicentennial, society events, arts and culture, everything. We’ve lived in Kerrville for 25 years now, so she knows what’s going on.

The weekly is going on two years old. It went in the black less than nine months after startup. Subscriptions are growing steadily enough that they’re planning another increase in the print run in a couple of months.

The larger mediasphere has grown more open to outside voices

In more ways than anyone realizes. Ten or fifteen years ago a major feature of a local paper (or local issue of a newspaper) was the TV guide. Lots of people listed it as a major reason, and in some case the only reason they subscribed. Now all the cable/dish systems have on-line directories and newspaper guides are nearly out of business. Same with stock market reports and weather.

“But that’s not what a newspaper is really like!” they howl.

You’d think that reporters, seeing how realistically TV and the movies treat newspapers, might be a little skeptical about how the silver screen covers car chases and gun battles. But no.

[Russ 2000]

LarryA, classifieds are down to near zero, too.

Jesse, you’re absolutely right about closing off that third avenue. Thing is, even when the paper DOES does hire a local writer, the papers seems to hate neighborhood angles in favor of a more metropolitan zeitgeist.

The one that came to mind as soon as I read this piece was Richard Roeper. He’s been a columnist rather than a reporter, but his first few years of columns were completely local. He doesn’t have the way with words that a Mike Royko had, but his columns read like a native from a neighborhood. (Having gone to the same parish and high school as he, I probably had more appreciation than most.) But then the newspaper encouraged its people to get on TV and radio as a promotional vehicle – and electronic news HATES covering neighborhoods. So his columns slowly turned more and more into the political gossip and boring pop culture criticism that they are today. Newspapers are making a conscious effort to be a print version of TV which to me makes no sense.

[Nike Dunk Low]

is good