The chief
penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold
office and rule.
Plato, Republic
Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.
The Sex Pistols
Earlier this
year, John Carroll died following a six-month battle with Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease (CJD), a rare, untreatable, degenerative brain condition in which an
infective agent eats away at gray matter as the victim precipitously loses
cognitive and neurological function and dies. The disease is marked by
rapid-onset dementia, paranoia, hallucinations, and personality changes, as
well as the deterioration of most physical sensation that effectively shuts
down the body’s cough reflex, so that many CJD patients succumb to pneumonia
before their brains stop working completely.[1]
There might be
less pleasant ways to go out than CJD, but not many. It is such an
unequivocally odious condition that if for some reason they so wished, an
editorial staff might even make American newspaper readers forgive somebody they
find equally odious – say, the one Enron guy who still hasn’t died – if they
reported that he was diagnosed with it. At least, of course, if they reported
it with enough Dickensian pathos.
A weird feature
of the human condition is that we often don’t love our enemies until something
atrocious happens to them – or, more likely, until they’re dead. Last semester,
a friend of mine wrote a scathing evaluation of a UGA political science
professor that recommended revoking the professor’s permission to teach that
course, only to wring his hands with guilt upon learning late in the summer
that the guy had died, and that, as fate would have it, he really would never
teach the class again. We also witness this phenomenon multiple times
throughout the five seasons of The Wire.
Jimmy McNulty mourns Stringer Bell’s murder just as their long-running game of
cat-and-mouse approaches its conclusion in McNulty’s favor. Stan Valchek solemnly
sends Frank Sobotka a silent memoriam in Polish at the end of season two. Omar
scoffs at Fat Face Rick’s suggestion that he killed Proposition Joe himself. The
impulse, it seems, is universal.
I
think John Carroll, if he had a sense of humor and self-awareness, would relish
the lyricism of his own death in light of his reputation. In his lifetime, the
lifelong newspaperman and editor was occasionally dogged by criticisms that he
embraced absolutism in reporting over more full-bodied investigation. He was
more likely to green-light a small-scale story of human interest and emotional
resonance – like that of a beloved newspaper editor dying of CJD – than a
holistic examination of a wider social problem. Some speculated this propensity
was out of a hunger for awards, a charge that was not unsubstantiated – along
with his own win as a writer for investigative reporting early in his career at
the Lexington Herald, the Los Angeles Times won thirteen
Pulitzer Prizes under his five-year leadership (four in 2004 alone), and the Baltimore Sun won two Pulitzers during
his nine years as its executive editor in the 1990s, including, incidentally,
one for its series on “a major league umpire's
children who were dying of a rare genetic disease.”[2][3]
I haven’t read that last story, but I imagine
it’s not exactly the kind of “important” journalism for which both a precedent
and a high bar was set for the Pulitzers by The
Washington Post’s series on Watergate. Still, while it may be true that
Carroll was hardly liker to his Post counterpart
Ben Bradlee than Dan Quayle was to Bradlee’s good friend Jack Kennedy, he was
also no “Enron” Jeff Skilling.[4]
He wasn’t even Jonah Jameson, the hyperbolically sensationalistic editor of the
Daily Bugle in the Spider-Man comics.
There was nothing so absolute about him. Criticisms of his so-called timidity
diminish in light of his efforts at the LA
Times to double the investigative team’s staff and to bear down on coverage
of the Iraq War against intense pressure from the paper’s parent company,
Tribune, to eliminate costly assets like war correspondents.[5]
His obituary in the New York Times
actually describes him as “one of the most influential newspaper editors of his
era.”[6]
And, perhaps most importantly, he is remembered fondly by nearly everyone who
worked with him.
The prominent exception,
of course, is Wire creator David
Simon, whose public stance on Carroll’s management of the Baltimore Sun in Simon’s final years as a reporter there has
evolved over the course of the last two decades from a semi-lighthearted disapproval
into a robust disdain. Simon, who gives out interviews like they’re Halloween
candy, has long been vocal about his dislike of and lack of respect for Carroll
and his editorial partner Bill Marimow, an animosity that has only expanded
with time.
Now here we are,
six months after Carroll’s death, and Simon has yet to publicly offer any
parting thoughts on his former boss. His uncharacteristic silence could be out
of spite, but more likely it’s out of respectful restraint, as he has already
left an enormous jar of piss on Carroll’s grave.
Because of
Simon, many will forever associate Carroll with the character of James Whiting,
the pretentious and jolly old elf who serves as executive editor of an
alternate-universe Sun in The Wire’s
fifth season. Simon has been very transparent about the fact that Whiting is
based on John Carroll, indicating in interviews scenes from the show that he
says were lifted wholesale from experiences he had with Carroll and Marimow,
who is recast on screen as the vaguely lecherous managing editor Thomas
Klebanow.
Everyone
loves a roman à clef with a thin façade, especially when
it’s about someone who deserves to be taken down a notch, like William Randolph
Hearst or Huey Long. But Carroll and Marimow may not entirely be the deserving
targets most viewers of The Wire most
likely (and understandably) assume they are.
I
first suspected this was possible after a telephone call from my mother
sometime in June. I was on season two of The
Wire at the time, and I must have told her that I was watching the show. It
was shortly after Carroll’s death, and she called me with the news, assuming I
would know who he was. I didn’t. She explained:
She
had been an editor in some capacity for nearly three decades, mostly for
newspapers. In that time, she had worked with just one editor-in-chief whom she
considered to be truly excellent and whom she considered a mentor. It wasn’t
John Carroll. It was Ed Bean, who as president of the Atlanta Press Club had
befriended Carroll, whom he saw as a kindred spirit and like-minded editor. She
explained that a lot of people in the print news community were upset by his
passing, and that many of them took issue with his portrayal on television (a
fictionalized version of Carroll also appears a few times in Homicide: Life On The Street). I thought
that was interesting, but I didn’t think about again for a while.
But
while watching the fifth season, I became perplexed at the discrepancy between
the show’s portrayal of Carroll and his professional reputation. I read up on
him and found that he had worked in Lexington, Kentucky at the same time my
father had been in journalism school in nearby Bowling Green. My dad told me
that immediately out of college he had been offered positions at Carroll’s Lexington Herald and the Louisville Courier-Journal, and that he
had chosen Louisville – it’s bigger, anyway. He had met Carroll once or twice
but most of what he knew about him was through friends who had worked at the Sun or the LA Times, some of whom considered Carroll to be the best supervisor
they had ever had.
None
of this is revelatory or anything. Still, it’s been bugging me that in a show
whose messages I’ve received perhaps all too completely, the one target of its
iconoclasm that resisted my disapproval was the one with whom I shared the
fewest degrees of separation. The implications were unsettling: if I could only
find it in myself to be skeptical about the portrayal of John Carroll (and to a
lesser extent Bill Marimow), then perhaps somebody with the same proximity to
the inspiration for, I don’t know, Tony Colicchio, might raise similar
objections. And nobody wants to find themselves sympathizing with Colicchio.
As
such, I’m interested in evaluating the fairness of The Wire’s depiction of the Sun
as Simon left it by digging up the roots of the discord. Later, I’ll evaluate
my findings through a lens that eschews the variously partisan and apathetic tendencies
that everyone else who’s written on this topic hasn’t managed to shake.
In preparation
for this project, I again grilled my parents for any gossip they might have –
on the 1990s Sun, on Carroll, on
Marimow, on Simon. As it happens, a friend of my dad’s, Jan Winburn, who works at
CNN, had worked at the Sun starting
in 1995, the year Simon left the paper, and knew both Carroll and Simon well. My
dad told me he’d ask her if she’d talk to me.
She responded
promptly. Her policy, she said, had always been to keep her mouth shut about
the beef, and to discuss it with me more than twenty years later would just be
to reopen old wounds. She said that the entire situation, more than anything,
saddens her, as she considers both men personal friends and great journalists.
She wished me luck, but was steadfast that she didn’t have anything else to
offer.
I
was disappointed, but her response was revealing in its own way. For a start,
it suggested that Carroll’s and Simon’s public antagonism was at least as much
personal as it was professional, which I hadn’t at all expected. As I found out
after more research, this was in fact the case. Clearly I had trod into thorny
territory. I considered backing out.
But I didn’t. So
if it’s going to get personal, we might as well be thorough, and as the nosy
voyeur of a personal battle among grown men I’ve never met, I might as well lay
my own cards on the table.
Both of my
parents are from the same dwindling pool of daily newspaper professionals as
David Simon, a cohort that has witnessed firsthand the whole arc of the media
landscape’s drastic renovation in the Internet age. This is the last group of
reporters to come into the game in the dark age before the advent of LexisNexis,
a time when photographers were actual staff members and any writing you did was
over the newsroom din of dozens of clacking electric typewriters. It’s a
generation of writers who became journalists out of a McNultyish combination of
egoism and passion, driven in equal measure by the belief that they were doing
“God’s work,” as Simon once put it,[7]
and by the vain self-perception of being the smartest boys and girls in
whatever room they’re in.
I’m not just bullshitting
here. These generalizations are straight from the source – my parents, their
friends, the many after-school hours and winter vacation days I spent reading
at empty desks amidst the constant ringing of phones, the soft and rapid clicks
of computer keyboards, and the newsroom chatter, quick and profane and clipped
and smug.
There’s also “A
Newspaper Can’t Love You Back,” David Simon’s Annie Hall-esque essay published in Esquire the same month that The
Wire concluded, in which he details
his doomed love affair with journalism. For him and countless others in his age
bracket, he explains, it started with Woodward and Bernstein, whose
unprecedented impact inspired Simon to join the “great gray line of ink-stained
hacks…with a cynic’s wariness of authority in harness with a good
newspaperman’s contempt of cant and hyperbole.”[8]
Simon writes that
in his early days at the Sun, he was
enamored of its aura of professional community. As a unit, the paper had as
comprehensive an understanding of the city’s machinery as any of that
machinery’s other important parts. If he needed intimate knowledge of a part of
the city with which he wasn’t familiar to thicken his reporting, he had
colleagues like Bill Zorzi and Rebecca Corbett (both namesakes of Wire characters) on every single
conceivable beat who had him covered. Everybody did what they did well and
nobody else did what they did.
The idea of the
Associated Press is to instill national news coverage with that same holistic
functionality. But while it does minimize the size of the print daily world, it
also ironically compels editors to seek out new hires on the basis of what sort
of personal profile they can bring the staff as opposed to what kind of piece
they could be in the paper’s clockwork. Case in point: my father, intriguingly,
has turned down job offers at different papers from both John Carroll and Bill
Marimow – Carroll by way of Carroll’s subordinate at the Lexington Herald-Leader some time in the early ‘80s; Marimow in a
tense phone call from the Sun’s
offices in 1999 that amounted to Marimow actually getting pissed when my dad
told him that he had accepted an offer from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just days earlier.
Beyond being a
mildly striking coincidence, Marimow’s call is demonstrative of the national
environment of competition that the Sun
had by then joined whole-heartedly. You see, months earlier my dad had not
taken a job offer from the New York Times,
for reasons I don’t completely understand. In any case, an unfulfilled offer
from the world’s finest daily is wicked leverage in the job market, and he shopped
around for positions in other East Coast cities with this as his calling card,
settling on Atlanta.
That Marimow
acted like my dad’s polite pass was a personal insult – like he was a
headhunter at Goldman Sachs instead of the damn Baltimore Sun – is also evidence of the sensitivity that was
symptomatic of the new wave of competiveness. The Newspaper, both as a broad
abstraction and as a unit, is not just a small world, but one whose social
atmosphere is decidedly tense. As such, the allegiances and rivalries that
develop in it do not always have rational explanations.
This – that the
factions that form within newsrooms can be as rooted in people’s feelings as in
professional opinion – might seem obvious, but it is one of a few skeleton keys
to the context of The Wire’s fifth
season. For all the skepticism and acid wit contained within the walls of a
newspaper, it would seem no place for the thin-skinned, and yet I can’t think
of a better place that doesn’t serve alcohol where you might go to harvest
bruised egos.
The Wire gets this right. Season five is rich
with hurt feelings, especially among the younger reporters in its alternate-universe
version of the Sun. Scott Templeton
has internalized the competition most severely, of course, getting pouty and
petulant when Gus Haynes hands off Templeton’s story to the far more qualified departing
police reporter Roger Twigg. What’s even more troubling about Templeton,
though, is his ability to get exaggeratedly upset when the veracity of his
sources is called into question – sources that he knows himself to have
falsified. Even insinuations and accusations that are true are a source of hurt
for him. Templeton’s character, apparently based on two young Sun journalists whom Simon refuses to
name, serves as a pretty cut-and-dry indictment of the way that Carroll’s
management style encouraged ruthless ambition in gross disproportion to talent.
Alma Gutierrez,
on the other hand, handles criticism with a more moderate disappointment.
And then there
are the older veterans, who mostly shake their heads at the new competition.
It’s a built-in defense to a career full of disappointments, something that the
paper’s leadership doesn’t seem to understand, to resentful results.
It culminates in
a supremely uncomfortable moment. When Gus Haynes risks (and ultimately loses)
his position by trying to pull the curtain back on Scott Templeton’s ruse,
Klebanow condescends to him: “Gus, I think this thing between you and Scott has
gotten personal.” Haynes looks astonished. Klebanow has just glibly assumed
that Haynes, a passionate, veteran reporter and Baltimore native, is jealous of Templeton – and he sees it a
logical way for Haynes to feel. Like Haynes has let his personal feelings cloud
his professional judgment.
Klebanow’s
cluelessness is indicative of a newer trend of interpersonal discontinuity between
masthead editors and the cubicle-bound host of section editors and staff that
doesn’t make immediate sense. After all, most editors start their careers as
writers – shouldn’t they stand with their staff?
I think it’s this downplaying of the personal, the idea that all newsroom
interaction should be professional,
that has engendered this movement. To be professional
is to be competitive, and competition is invariably a personal engagement. And the competition, inevitably, is for the
approval of the editors, engendering a fundamental disparity that is at times
bitter.
Simon, for his
part, begrudgingly admits that much of his contention with the Sun’s management at the time of his
departure was personal.[9]
Indeed, his disdain for Carroll seems to trump even his disdain for Martin
O’Malley, although he did once express amusement at “the
notion that the editors (in season five) are any more venal than anybody else
who has been in command of an institution on The Wire.”[10]
“This is a grudge which (sic) extends more than a decade and is demeaning not to us but to
him,” Marimow once said. “To hold a grudge that long poisons the
grudge-holder.”
Still,
Simon’s insinuations of personal victimization at John Carroll’s and Bill
Marimow’s hands are pertinent. As reporters, both Carroll and Marimow suckled
at the teat of ‘70s Philadelphia Inquirer
executive Gene Roberts, an editor whose followers would “follow him to
war,” as my dad puts it.[11]
Carroll had actually begun his career at the Baltimore Sun in 1966, relocating to Roberts’ Inquirer in 1973, and then moving again in 1979 when he was offered
the editor position at the Lexington
Herald, which was owned by the Inquirer’s
company, Knight-Ridder.
In
their time at the Inquirer together,
the team had developed their ideas of what made good reporting. In 1978, they
were co-investigators in a series on police violence in Philadelphia.
In 1991, the
pair stormed the Sun with a coven of
disciples from the Inquirer who
continued to leak into the Sun’s offices – or, as Simon has called them,
“carpetbaggers.”[12] With them, they brought not only their own
ideas of how to run a paper, but by many accounts an accompanying notion that
their way of running a paper was superior.
“I love the Inquirer and the way that it was,” Bill
Marimow told the American Journalism
Review at the time. “What’s happening at the Sun is a variation on what was happening at the Inquirer in the 1970s. There’s a robust,
slightly chaotic feel as well as intense pressure from competition.”[13]
“There’s very
much a sense of ‘We’re building a paper,’ which has to be annoying to the
people here,” said one Sun employee
who came on in February of 1997. Certainly some of them took it personally.
In 1990, Simon
left the Sun for a year to write Homicide, returning to Carroll’s
leadership. Two years later, he left another two years to write The Corner. He returned in April of
1995, and promptly requested a raise.
“You would have
thought I had thrown a dead dog on the table,” he later said of the result. “I
was told it was bad form to come back after a leave and ask for a raise. It
wasn’t about the money. The lion’s share of my income was from royalties from
the books and television show. It was a telling moment of, ‘do you value me or
not?’ The answer was no.”[14]
To Simon, it
seems clear where this treatment originates. In “A Newspaper Can’t Love You
Back,” he relates the story of a tense lunch he had with Bill Marimow soon
after returning from Homicide:
(Marimow):
"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."
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."[15]
And
they finish eating and head back to the office. “It’s not personal,” Simon finishes.
He’s
reminded of a scene in Mario Puzo’s The
Godfather, in which Tom Hagen eases Michael Corleone’s reservations about a
mob hit. “It’s not personal, Michael,” Tom says, “it’s just business.”[16]
There’s another
feature of Simon’s generation of journalists that I haven’t yet mentioned, and
that’s a shared sense that the press is supposed to be the one public
institution free of the trappings of bureaucracy. The “free and independent
press” is supposed to keep all those other venal institutions in check. The
only rules should be the standard procedures and ethics of the craft that are seemingly
innate to good reporters.
At least, these
are the illusions with which they all showed up to their first staff positions
on whatever city desk would take them. But a newspaper is a consumer product,
and journalism is an industry like any other, and often competing interests in
the industry trump substantial progress. Not only journalism, but the very act
of being a journalist, is business.
And, as Bill
Zorzi put it, business is always
personal.[17]
In 1986, the
year Times-Mirror bought the Baltimore
Sun, the paper had been owned by various Baltimore families for a year shy
of 150. Before Carroll and Marimow showed up in 1991, it had been in bad shape
in terms of both finances and quality, and the new ownership alone wasn’t
promising to keep the paper afloat.
In 1987, Sun employees, writing staff and
otherwise, went on strike in response to benefit cuts by the company. David Simon
was one of the strike captains. He found the experience embittering. “It
stopped being fun (after that),”[18]
he said.
Throughout the
nineties, there was a series of layoffs and demotions that tended to hit staff
that pre-dated Carroll and Marimow, like Matt Littwin, who left the paper after
Carroll got rid of his column. There were more cutbacks on benefits. Entire
news beats would get cut if the company deemed them redundant, even when they
weren’t. In September of 1995, when Simon left the paper, Times-Mirror
dissolved the long-running Evening Sun and
laid off its permanent staff, introducing another round of buyouts.[19]
And yet, it
seemed to most that Marimow and Carroll were doing something right. Both the Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review wrote up the Sun positively. Between 1996 and 1997,
the paper’s daily circulation expanded by 7,000 units[20]
– an impressive number, although this might have had more to do with a decision
by times Times-Mirror to print more copies for street and newsstand
distribution than it did with a spike in subscriptions; we see in The Wire that even Baltimoreans as
involved as Nerese Campbell[21]
get their Sun papers from street
peddlers like Bubs. This sort of progress was relative to quantifiable,
national standards, then – not to Baltimore itself.
But it didn’t
matter. The paper’s success in the numbers game caught the attention of those
in print media whose concern was the bottom line. In 2000, Tribune Media bought
out Times-Mirror and all its assets, one of which they apparently considered to
be John Carroll, whom they offered a dream job: executive editor of the LA Times. Carroll, who had from the
outset treated the Sun as a clean-up
project, understandably jumped on the opportunity.
It’s materially
true that most legacy daily newspapers in major American cities have suffered
not only financially in the last twenty years, but in quality. There are books
on all the reasons this has happened – the Internet, the change that
click-counting technology has wrought on an advertisement-based business model,
the price of keeping seasoned reporters in a job market in which legions of
untested postgrads scramble for any work they can find. But the biggest culprit
is conglomeration, the process in which publishers are swallowed by bigger
parent companies that are in turn swallowed by media conglomerates like Tribune
or the Hearst Corporation or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, lumbering and
Philistinic titans of industry that invariably do their best to impose their
corporate culture and ideology on the free and independent press.
I’m being
intentionally hyperbolic, but it’s true that institutional pressure is as
strong a force in journalism as in any other field. We see it anywhere there’s
a larger geographic chain of command in which sweeping policy decisions reach overlooked
corners of the empire where they might not be ideal. My history thesis, which I
just finished, examined this pattern as it applies to housing policy in Atlanta:
often, national and global concerns and policy paradigms dictate action for
local, specific agents.
As we all know from Merton’s Law, this kind of
massive purposeful action almost always has unintended negative consequences.
In housing development, these consequences largely consist of mass displacement
of demographics that are already unstable. Elsewhere, it’s the compulsion of
subordinates to falsify results. This is self-evident. As David Simon explains:
“The
stakes are too high for journalism to do that. I understand why politicians do
it. I understand why police industries cook their stats. I understand why
school administrators cook their test scores. I understand people in a
bureaucracy doing that stuff because I expect so little of them at this point
after years of being a reporter…(but) if the paper can’t address itself to hard
truths, then what the fuck?”[22]
But Carroll and Marimow alike seemed to
understand these implications intimately. Both editors, since Times-Mirror’s
acquisition by Tribune, have waged their own battles against out-of-town management:
Carroll, who stepped down from his entire five-year tenure in Los Angeles
following pressure from Tribune to give more page space to the AP and cover more
lighthearted, suburban topics; and Marimow, who was fired from the Philadelphia Enquirer in 2013 by
publisher Bob Hall for refusing to fire five senior staffers and for “continu(ing) to
thwart changes and initiatives necessary for the success (and survival for that
matter) of the newspapers," according to a memo.[23]
What, then,
could Simon be on about, if not the editors’ alignment with bad industry
paradigms? Perhaps, in their attempt to simply pull out the carpet, the “Philly
Invasion” inadvertently ripped an ideological fissure in the Sun’s foundation?
According to
Simon, yes. I don’t need to go into this much. It’s all in The Wire. Carroll was interested in “the pornography of poverty,”
as Simon puts it. It was all about the A1. He was only interested in stories
with “Dickensian” appeal (a phrase that Simon claims Carroll was actual fond of
using). That interest faded each New Year’s Day with the prize season.
Maybe he was
this thirsty for worldly prestige – the sorts of stories the Sun printed during his tenure could
certainly suggest it. But how could anybody know his deepest motivations? Why
would Simon not only offer his guess at what they were on The Wire, but in practically every interview he’s given since
season five ended?
The answer would
have to be personal. To Simon, the
personal and the financial and the professional were intertwined. To him, the alleged
disregard for his vision and input was as personal as the Philly squad’s perceived
belittlement of the Sun’s staff, as
personal as the elimination of crucial beats.
So yes, maybe
Carroll’s idea of hard-hitting journalism was just middlebrow schmaltz. But that’s
a Shakespearean of a conclusion to make about somebody, and there really aren’t
any indicators aside from Simon’s testimony that he actually was the “craven,
prize-hungry editor” that Whiting is. I have to give Carroll the benefit of the
doubt. I believe he really did believe that shit like sick kids was inherently
good journalism, that pressure and competition improved newsroom performance
instead of encouraging pandering and
that the only social impact of a piece was the short-term emotional reaction it
got out of its audience. But I’m also not David Simon, and I don’t see much
point in trying to guess Carroll’s motives. The truth is, while Carroll did in
some ways miss the forest in favor of the tree, he at least was outwardly
interested in covering Baltimore – not, as the Sun has increasingly done since
his departure, the suburbs. He fought for local control and ultimately stepped
down (albeit in LA) in disappointment at his inability to secure it. And he had
faith in the power of the paper.
Therein lies one
of the great personal differences between Simon and Carroll. In the two decades
since his decision to leave the business for good, Simon’s belief in the
utility and efficacy of journalism as a social force has deteriorated
considerably.
“Contemporary
journalism…actually matters very little,” he told the garbage magazine Reason in 2004. “The world now is almost
inured to the power of journalism…I've become increasingly cynical about the
ability of daily journalism to effect any kind of meaningful change.”
He could be right. But his persistence
to talk about it suggests that he wishes it was different, that his youthful
idealism via Woodward and Bernstein lingers in his psyche. Compare Simon’s
remarks to those of John Carroll’s speech to the National Press Foundation in
1998:
“Today’s journalists are constantly
being reminded that they are functionaries of business, yet they know in their
hearts that the stock price is a hollow god. They sense that newspaper work
can, and should, be a wonderfully satisfying and entertaining way to engage the
world, and that in a free society there is no mightier sword than the written
word.”[24]
David Simon and John Carroll wanted the same thing. They just
had different ideas of how to get it.
Not that it
matters much, but I wanted to point out that this paper is the penultimate
long-form writing assignment that I will submit in my undergraduate career.
There have certainly been a lot of them. And still, in my three and a half
years at the university, my favorite assignment of them all was the seven pages
I wrote for my sophomore Comparative Lit class in which I turned a very brief
passage of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur – in
which Launcelot and Guenever “do it” for the first time – into a dismissal of pure textual analysis on the count that it’s
irrelevant and futile and ultimately reveals much more about the context and
ego of the critic than it does about the context or the ego of the text’s
author –which is to say, the meaning or the purpose of the text in any world other
than the one contained within it. The real world.
I got a C on the
paper, although the professor had me read it in front of the class, proclaiming
it “brilliant” and also exactly the opposite of what he was asking for. I
remember being really pissed – why should a PhD. from Princeton give this guy the
right to determine my fate based on his own bad purview? I’m realizing now how
naïve I was. I was still right, of course – but he knew I was right, and he
still had a job to do, which was to teach textual analysis.[25]
It kind of
reminds of the way that John Carroll and Bill Marimow have long insisted that
they were more sympathetic to David Simon’s hatred of out-of-town management
and quest for context similar to my own than he would have it. The reality of
who they were is not as sinister as the way Simon portrayed them.
The Wire is a work of art that both
contains its own hermetic universe and exists on Earth. All that means is that
it’s a work of art. It is a curated fictional representation of the world in
which it exists, and inevitably so – narrative by nature contains some contrivance.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Accordingly, the
way you watch The Wire dictates
whether or not you might consider Simon’s portrayal of Carroll & Marimow
fair. Ask yourself this: is it fair
to blast Tommy Carcetti for failing to fulfill campaign promises after he
learns that he’s inherited Mayor Royce’s massive debt? Certainly it’s fair to
criticize Martin O’Malley for juking police statistics? Or are they – the
character and the inspiration – both just individuals contending with
institutional forces much bigger than themselves? Similarly, are Whiting and
Klebanow – and by extention, Carroll and Marimow – really just trying to
maintain journalistic integrity in the face of seismic industry changes? Or is
their definition of “journalistic integrity” really a phony one, middlebrow
schmaltz disguised as “hard-hitting reporting?”
Fortunately,
I don’t have to answer that question, because I set out to judge Simon, not the
state of journalism or even Carroll and Marimow themselves. In fiction, judgments
of fairness and character are the prerogative of the audience. This is just
basic shit.
And yet Simon,
never one for abstraction, still has a probably subconscious tendency to deal in
the same absolutism he denounces in his former bosses – insofar as it regards
institutions. Normally, The Wire is
far more nuanced when it comes to its human characters. But as the Chicago Tribune (Tribune Media’s
flagship publication) points out, the editors in season 5 are really the
flattest, most one-dimensional characters the show has created, and perhaps the
least realistic.[26]
As Simon gleefully countered, seasons one, two, three, and four would have been
similarly pilloried by police, dockworkers, teachers, and drug dealers had
they, instead of journalists, been the ones assigned to reviewing TV shows.[27]
It’s the age of
transparency, and just as I wrote as a wide-eyed young collegian, it sure as
hell does matter what somebody like David Simon thinks of his own work and its
meaning and purpose. But it also matters what the rest of us, the audience,
thinks of it. We are the world into which the work is received.
David Simon is
brilliant. But like most brilliant people, his understanding of the world
contains some major holes, and for somebody whose opinion of public
institutions is roundly cynical, his automatic identification of those institutions
with the individuals caught up in them, at least in this one case, is
strikingly naïve.
So, the answer
to my question: yes, his portrayal is fair according to the law of artistic
license. But its curated nature prevents it from being entirely accurate, and the
fact that Simon retains the limitations of his personal vendetta in interviews
and writings is not fair.
But is it fair
of me to make that judgment? Is it fair of me, the voyeur, to insert myself
into a battle that I’ve just spent 20 pages establishing is, in fact, personal?
Is it even fair of me to interpret it as personal, and then to turn around and
criticize David Simon for trying to interpret John Carroll?
I don’t know,
and I really don’t care. I’m not one of the belligerents, after all – just the referee.
I just came to set the terms. To my surprise, I found the terms already to be
in place, by Marshall McLuhan, no less: the
message is the medium. And the medium is as fair as life itself, as sturdy
and accessible as the arena.
But there were
always two arenas: fiction and reality.
—30—
[1] "Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Fact
Sheet." National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
National Institute of Health, 2 Nov. 2015. Web.
[2] Rasmussen, Frederick. "John S.
Carroll, Former Sun Editor, Dies at 73." Baltimore Sun. N.p., 14
June 2015. Web.
[3] Which was written by Lisa
Pollack, who now works for This American
Life.
[4] Who is currently serving time at
the same Mickey Mouse rich guy prison that once housed Watergate “hatchet man”
Charles W. Colson – it’s all connected!
[5] Mahler, Jonathan. "John Carroll,
Editor Who Reinvigorated The Los Angeles Times, Is Dead at 73." New
York Times 14 June 2015: n. pag. Web.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Rose, Cynthia. "The Originator of
TV's 'Homicide' Remains Close to His Police-reporter Roots." Seattle
Times. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Feb. 1999.
[10] Sepinwall, Alan. "The Wire: David
Simon Q&A." The Star-Ledger [Essex County, NJ] 9 Mar. 2008: n.
pag. Web.
[11] Shepard, Alicia C. "Rising
Sun." American Journalism Review (1997): n. pag. UGA Literary
Reference Center. Web.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Simon 2008
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Blackwell, Mary Alice. "Fun Comes
down to 'The Wire'" The Daily Progress [Charlottesville, VA] 23
Mar. 2007: n. pag. Web.
[19] Shepard 1997
[21] This is completely tangential,
but I’m wondering now if the character of Nerese Campbell – based almost
wholesale on Martin O’Malley’s mayoral successor Sheila Dixon, who was indicted
in 2009 for embezzling funds intended for the poor – was also named in allusion
to Bill Campbell, a two-term Atlanta mayor whose similar failure to account for
millions of dollars in a federal housing subsidy boondoggle and tax evasion
landed him two years in the pen. Probably not.
[22] Pearson 2009
[25] On second thought, he was the department head, so I have no
idea from where the pressure for such inanity would have come…
[26] Ryan, Maureen. "David Simon Talks
about His Career in Journalism and the Final Chapter of 'The Wire." Chicago
Tribune 10 Jan. 2008: n. pag. Web.
[27] Pearson 2009
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