Articles

Friday, January 23, 2015

JIG'S UP

I nominated Twitter heroes Desus Nice and the Kid Mero for a Peabody Award. This is my nomination form.

Desus vs. Mero vs. The World
Think back, if you can, to two and a half weeks ago. Kanye West has just released “Only One,” a touching tribute to his infant daughter, featuring some guy named Paul McCartney. White Beatles fans, grasping for any shred of relevance, come out of the woodwork in protest, condemning the song as if McCartney is somehow slumming by working with Kanye. Seeing an opportunity to stir the pot, social media trolls join the conversation, firing off “who is Paul McCartney?” tweets to rile up the unenlightened. They accomplish their mission: the irony, as per usual, goes completely over the heads of mainstream media outlets. The “news” makes Good Morning AmericaGlenn Beck is foaming at the mouth. A WASP-y anchor reads one of the tweets: “Kanye has a great ear for talent. This Paul McCartney guy gonna be huge one day.” “Poor folks, they just don’t know any better,” he smirks.
         That tweet is the brainchild of one Desus Nice from the Bronx, New York, who happens to be one of the hottest Internet media personalities of the moment among those in the know. The backlash his McCartney joke received from those not in the know is indicative of the type of content he and his partner, fellow Bronxite the Kid Mero, deliver regularly: hip, mocking, and provocative in a way that not everyone understands – in one word, savvy. Together, Desus and Mero comprise Complex Media’s brilliant weekly podcast, Desus vs. Mero, an online video series in which the duo sits before a green screen at a table made of plastic crates and cardboard boxes and riffs on the past several days in New York news, hip-hop, basketball, and pop culture. It’s like a Bronx-centric Daily Show, except its “redeeming social value” is its lack thereof: impenetrably offensive, the podcast combines its hosts’ off-the-grid street smarts with the hard, responsive wit of their independently successful Twitter accounts. Desus, a sharp-tongued Bronx native of Jamaican parentage, and Mero, a loud, burly Dominican with two kids and a Jewish wife, serve their refreshingly unique takes on topics as diverse as white supremacist David Duke (who “came back out of nowhere like a racist D’Angelo, so shouts to him”), convicted Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda (whose breakout single “Hot Nigga” was “a Rap Genius (annotation) of every crime he’s committed”), and the abysmal day-to-day of this season’s Knicks (“Carmelo out here dressed like Tom Wolfe”) with the amused detachment of lifelong New Yorkers.
Consequently, their jokes can be New York-normative to the point of obscurity to outsiders, but that’s part of their appeal: picking up on the joke is central to its pleasure. Take one of Desus’ tweets: “’What if I told you MLK wasn’t the only one with a dream?’ ESPN 30 for 30 presents: ‘Longer than Selma: The Road To The Knicks’ 6th Win.’” The joke is exemplary of Desus and Mero’s brand of comedy. In order to “get” it, you have to understand that a.) the Knicks, at game 42, had only won five games, the last one more than a month previously, b.) the game was played on Martin Luther King Day, c.) the Academy Awards had snubbed Selma earlier that day, and d). the tweet is winkingly parodying ESPN’s overblown promos for its own programs. These are what Desus calls “levels;” the unfortunate irony is that exegesis of these levels tends to diminish the strength of their humor. So if the power of “getting it” is the main comedic weapon in Desus & Mero’s arsenal, could audiences not getting it be their drawback?
Fortunately, the humor is corrosive enough to seep through social barriers, and despite their topical fixation on emic phenomena, Desus vs. Mero’s reach is widespread. In its year and a half of existence, the podcast’s influence on the way people think about culture has been subtly groundbreaking. Some of its many catchphrases – “peak caucasity,” “struggle rappers,” “knowledge darts” – have caught on in the lexicon in such a way that if you don’t know their meanings, you probably would have no use for them. Yet these tags have worked their way into places no one would expect: MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who grew up with Desus in the Bronx, has adopted his old friend’s sardonic quip “gotta hear both sides” on his show All In, most notably as a criticism of President Obama’s public iffyness over the protests against police misconduct in Ferguson, MO. #Caucasity is a popular Vine tag. “I be making up words y’all use,” reads Mero’s Twitter bio, and it’s not an empty boast: the duo’s microsocial influence extends beyond their (substantial) audience and into the very mainstream media that they scoff at. Desus and Mero don’t just participate in conversations. They don’t just steer conversations. They start conversations.
Desus’ McCartney stunt is a prime example of how the hosts self-reflexively generate buzz – its humor is accessible only to those who keep up, but when it works best it provokes a response even from those who are behind. Desus was delighted with the reaction to the tweet, engaging the benighted on social media and capitalizing on the opportunity for self-promotion. “What’s a good show where I can go and apologize to Yacubians?” he wondered, using the now-common term he coined for “white devils,” or followers of the demon Yacub. “700 ClubMike & MollyFriends on Netflix?” Mero jumped in on the playful antagonism: “Why the dudes trolling Desus look like Jake Fogelnest with wild nutrient deficiencies?”
These whimsical aggressions aren’t just oppositional to white people – they’re oppositional to anyone who doesn’t get it. This doesn’t make them elitist, though: there’s room for everyone in DvM land, those who get it and those who don’t. Desus once posited that white people in Brooklyn like to put cucumbers in their water “to make it less spicy,” to an overwhelming if expected barrage of responses that “water isn’t spicy.” The social response Desus and Mero elicit is almost as much a part of their content as the content itself. Their outreach involves those it skewers, and they’ve even hosted on the show some of the people they mock most viciously, like child Vine star Lil Terrio. So while as comedians they ostensibly prefer obscurantism to didacticism, their worldview is comprehensive enough to offer something of a cultural schooling to those left out of the loop, but only after the benighted have endured the requisite ribbing. They’re not just a cult act, they’re educational. They’re ground zero for objective cool, telling the same stories as other popular media to a wide audience from a first-hand perspective, and with a detached authenticity so pure and severe as to be meta: as the ultimate source of cultural commentary, Desus vs. Mero means culture commenting on itself.
          All stars possess this sort of self-awareness; the first sign of it for D&M came right when their audio-only podcast was becoming popular enough for Complex to scrape together the funding to upgrade it to a video format. A few days before their laptop-screen debut, Mero tweeted a picture of himself and a bearded white guy – “Desus and Mero in the flesh,” read the caption. The fanbase went nuts: they didn’t know whether to believe that Desus was actually white; his Twitter avatar had always been, cryptically, a dog wearing a balaclava. Desus couldn’t be white – he couldn’t be the genuine authority and source of cultural commentary he seemed to be if he looked like that, people responded. For several days, Desus played along with the joke, amending his #whitepeopleareawesome hashtag with #yesweare. After the first video episode aired, the jokes that have come to be known as “Desusgate” were put to rest – Desus is black – but the anxiety that a cultural icon so hip could be disgraced simply by showing his face had already come to light. Desus retweeted Mero’s picture with a new caption: “GENTRIFICATION.”
The beauty of Desus vs. Mero evident in Desusgate is that the show hasn’t yet been and probably won’t be “gentrified,” even as the Bronx Bullies become stars. That beauty is sustained by the fact that the duo has become stars in about the hippest way possible. Chris Hayes started interacting with them online around April of last year. In August, Texans running back Arian Foster nominated Desus for the Ice Bucket Challenge. In November, they were profiled in New York Magazine, where Mero revealed that he had been collaborating with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig on a couple of TV projects. Last night, the duo made their debut on MTV2’s Guy Codes; within the last week, both of them have been verified on Twitter.
Perhaps their most high-profile appearance outside the Internet (Good Morning America notwithstanding) was Desus’ appearance on CNN’s Parts Unknown, where he served as former Peabody winner Anthony Bourdain’s tour guide of the Bronx. Bourdain’s particular strength is finding “real” food and “real” culture in places where “fake” people – tourists, Yacubians, people who defend the Beatles in online arguments – would never think to go; like Desus and Mero, his calling card is authenticity. His deference to Desus as a primary source alongside such illustrious hip-hop innovators as Afrika Bambaataa and Melle Mel suggests that Desus is here to stay, and that, like in the early days of hip-hop, there’s a new cultural revolution brewing in New York right now, a revolution of authenticity and genuinity. Desus and Mero are the first figureheads to document it.
Desus and Mero are the real item: cultural tour guides to anyone interested in seeing more than the attractions, challengers of those who aren’t. No matter how popular they get, they can’t sell out, because their appeal is their “realness.” Their authenticity is their product, and it’s a product that even canonizing institutions as prominent as the Peabody Awards can not contaminate, only bolster. Of course, not everybody gets that they’re important, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not; it just means that we’re all living in a world where influence is relative, and it takes special power to be able to pull everyone, including the unknowing, into your sway. Even those who don’t get it are active participants in a rapidly disseminating worldview oppositional to the middle American status quo and East Coast bourgeois preciousness that the unenlightened haters espouse. In a way, these haters are unwitting agents in a Desus and Mero world.

Poor folks. They just don’t know any better.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Double Bounce

Here is a video I made my second year of college about some of the weirdos who go to the roller rinks in Athens.


...the life of kings

This is a piece I wrote about legacy-media beefs for an English class I took about The Wire, a semi-popular cable TV drama that ended in 2008.

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.
[8] Simon, David. Esquire 1 Mar. 2008: n. pag. LexisNexis Total Research System [LexisNexis]. Web.
[9] Pearson, Jesse. "David Simon." Vice. Vice Media, 2 Oct. 2009. Web.
[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.
[12] Sepinwall 2008
[13] Shepard 1997
[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
[20] Ibid.
[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
[23] Davies, Dave. "Why Was Bill Marimow Fired?" Newsworks. N.p., 9 Oct. 2013. Web.
[24] Mahler 2015
[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