True to Life

The Newsroom, the Wire and the Bottom Line.

by Duane Swierczynski

Late last summer, a few City Paper staffers made a pilgrimage to a little suburb of Baltimore, Md. There, one of the last-ever episodes of HBO's The Wire was being shot.

We were on set thanks to a friend, novelist Laura Lippman, who happens to be married to series creator David Simon. She knew we were big Wire fans here; at one point, I thought Doron Taussig was going to fall to his knees and throw his arms around the faux marble columns in the faux mayor's office.

But the visit began hours before that, when we stepped out of the stifling August heat and into a stuffy warehouse, which was lined with endless shelves of props — desktops, sinks, chairs. It kind of looked like an apocalyptic Home Depot.

After winding our way past the plywood backs of various sets and up a series of staircases, we found ourselves in the middle of the offices of The Baltimore Sun. Not the real Sun office, of course, but a stunning re-creation, right down to the weird little toys reporters keep in their cluttered cubicles.

This, of course, is Simon's strength: a slavish devotion to authenticity. He's even referred to his own process as "stealing life."

Simon would have been our hero if he'd stopped with his 1991 classic Homicide: Year on the Killing Streets, in which he embedded himself with the Baltimore Police Department's murder unit for a full year. But with every season of The Wire, he's brought journalism's complex, nuanced and hyper-realistic storytelling style to television, a medium not exactly known for its nuance. (Can you imagine trying to sell a network executive on a cop show about labor disputes or school reform?)

And now, with the fifth and final season, Simon has turned the camera back on us.

You know — the ones who were supposed to have been telling stories about labor disputes and school reform.

Earlier this year, Simon told The New Yorker's Margaret Talbot: "[The fifth season] is about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm — the journalists. 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 bottom line increasingly influences what is covered and how it is covered. This is the drama of being a journalist these days: What can we afford to report? Where should we focus our resources? Newsrooms are shrinking, and at the same time, the copy hole expands — not in print, but online, where electrons are limitless and (virtually) free.

But while we all figure this out, what is going unwatched?

As we've seen this past year, reporters are too often tempted by low-hanging fruit — the astronaut chicks in diapers, the (alleged) hate-mongering pugilist newscaster, the pregnant teen pop star. (For more of these, check out Shaun Brady's rundown on page 8.) It doesn't cost much to report those kind of stories. The special effects are already there; all you have to do is point a camera or press "publish" on a blog. No truth-gathering required.

Yes, these things are fun to write about. But it shouldn't come at the exclusion of real stories. This fascination with the pop-culture horror show — which seems to grow every year, with every slashed news budget — only takes journalism further and further off-mission.

So we're eagerly awaiting The Wire this Sunday, Jan. 6, to watch Simon's unflinching take on the topic.

After all, we've seen the sets. We know how seriously he takes this stuff.

(duane@citypaper.net)