Wire Creator Decries Papers’ ‘Race to the Bottom’

Speaking with what one audience member described as “impassioned cynicism,” The Wire producer and writer David Simon lectured to a packed room at the Graduate School of Journalism Wednesday night about his broad journalism experience and his belief that American newspapers are, on the whole, “fucked up."

Simon joked about how the journalism school only invited him to speak after the fifth and last season of his acclaimed HBO drama, which features a subplot which takes place in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun, aired.

“When you do a TV show and you do it about the death of the working class,” he said, “they don’t call you and ask you to speak at the Columbia Journalism School ... But [if] you write about how journalism itself has gone to shit, they call you ... They interview you ad nauseam. You become very special, because there is nothing journalists like to talk about more than journalists.”

As a crime beat reporter, Simon spent nearly a decade getting to know the ins and outs of the Baltimore police department, the urban community, and the underworld of drug dealers and users. Years later, he parlayed this experience into a television series that used its five seasons to explore five different aspects of Baltimore, each of which it painted as complex and deeply troubled.

He scoffed at the idea that his show’s final season, which focused on the newsroom of a paper based on his longtime former employer the Baltimore Sun, was based on his own bitterness. Rather, he said, it reflects serious concerns about the overall state of print journalism.

“Yeah, I am a son of a bitch,” he said, “but that doesn’t explain the last 60 hours of The Wire.”

Simon’s time as a reporter, he said, “ended poorly”, but his time at HBO “ended wonderfully” because of the independence the station gave him to work on The Wire. “If I was at all a gracious man,” he said, “I would get down on my hands and knees and thank the sons of bitches who came in from out of town and fucked up my newspaper because they gave me a whole second career and taught me a job skill.”

Unsparing in his use of expletives, Simon spoke frankly about his time at the Sun and even more frankly about American print journalism overall. Lamenting the assault on newspapers by television and the Internet, he described what he saw as a “race to the bottom” perpetrated by newsrooms that do not understand they are losing readers precisely by trying to compete with TV and the Internet on the rivals’ battlefields.

Simon also decried what he described as a move away from true investigative journalism and toward cheaper scandal stories that he said are more likely to win awards.

“It’s easy shit if you caught somebody with their hand in the till,” he explained. “To get all of the facts arrayed in a way that makes that apparent is easy compared to the ‘why.’ The ‘why’ is epic. The ‘why’ is where journalism becomes an adult game ... I found that there were less and less ‘adults’ in charge of the industry and in charge of the newsroom.”

david.xia@columbiaspectator.com