Putting All the Pieces Together

Say this much about the fifth and final season of HBO's celebrated Baltimorecrime saga "The Wire": it's ending with a bang, not a whimper. After four seasons spent picking apart one civic pillar after another (the legal system, the political process, the school system), the show has turned its gun barrels on the media in season five and--go figure--the media is firing right back. A controversial storyline about a dishonest reporter and a phony serial killer has divided fans and television critics alike, and that's just fine with David Simon, the brain behind "The Wire." He's spent the last two months serving up impassioned, profanity-laced interviews and writing essays for The Washington Post and Esquire about the death rattle of his beloved newspaper industry. (Simon was a longtime reporter for The Baltimore Sun prior to his second career in television.) In print, Simon can come off as an overblown lefty crusader, which is one more reason you shouldn't believe everything you read. The guy just loves a good argument. He's also got a well-developed sense of humor about himself. When NEWSWEEK visited the Baltimore set of "The Wire" back in August 2007, Simon wrapped up a long, anticapitalist rant in a parking lot near the set with a weary laugh. "Christ," he said. "Listen to me spout my proletariat bullshit and then get into my Lexus SUV." It could be a moral for the show itself: no one's hands are completely clean. With just a few episodes of "The Wire" remaining--the series finale airs on March 9--Simon reflected on the season so far in an e-mail conversation with NEWSWEEK'S Devin Gordon. Fair warning to fans of the show who aren't caught up yet: what follows will spill a lot of beans, so if you don't want to know what happens in season five, stop reading right now. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Season five, more than any other, seems to pivot on a major plot device--the phony serial killer created by Detectives McNulty and Freamon, and by Scott Templeton, the Baltimore Sun reporter who unknowingly joins in on the lie. You pull it off with the show's usual verisimilitude, but I do think the plotline has asked fans to take something of a leap of faith. Knowing how much of the show comes directly from the experiences of your writers, was there a specific incident that inspired this storyline? And was there any debate among the writing team about whether it was believable enough?
David Simon: I disagree in all respects with the premise. We legalized drugs in West Baltimore in season three and did so in full view of half the police department, if not the community itself. Certainly, on that basis it required as much a leap of faith as anything conjured in this season. The manner in which the serial killer is faked--the forensic ambiguities of a post-mortem choking of a fresh corpse--are precisely accurate. I was in the chief medical examiner's office one morning when a county detective had to fight hard to avoid having an OD turned into a homicide by a cutter who was misreading the trauma. And the lack of attention paid to deaths in that particular cohort--the homeless--is rather stunning. We didn't stretch very far at all.

As for a reporter lying about it, I regard this development as not a device at all. We had a guy cooking it at The Sun, repeatedly. The newsroom got wise to it after repeated retractions. And cooking it is a commonality in all newsrooms. [Jayson] Blair … [Janet] Cooke, [Stephen] Glass--you ask any veteran newsman at any major paper and he'll recollect reporters who were caught and quietly dispatched, or who, for various reasons, were allowed to skate. And I love the way that whenever the latest incident occurs, the journalism community reacts as if it's the rarest of aberrations. At what point do we begin to acknowledge that the ambition inherent within the construct provokes some to fraud? The problem, I believe, is far more systemic than journalists will comfortably admit, and in fact, most Americans sense this. More than 60 percent believe that some portion of the news report is manufactured or exaggerated by reporters. Count me--a lover of newspapering--among that 60 percent, having seen it happen routinely in my own newsroom. So I don't feel as if there is anything particularly unbelievable about a guy cooking it.

Am I being too critic-y in thinking that the phony serial killer storyline is a dig at both the cultural consumption habits of Americans and Hollywood in general--that the only way to get anyone's attention these days is to throw a serial killer at them?
There is very much a critique in the fixation that Americans have with the pornography of violence, as opposed to the root causes of violence. We have zero interest in why the vast majority of violence actually happens and what might be done--politically, economically, socially--to address the issue. But give us a killer doing twisted s--t or, better still, doing it to pretty white girls, and the media and its consumers lose all perspective. We are definitely speaking to that.

The serial killer is killing homeless men. In Baltimore or elsewhere, who gives a f---? They are not white ex-cheerleaders lost in Aruba. They are not close. Nobody cares about that cohort. There were a series of homeless men killed the year I was in the Baltimore homicide unit [for Simon's 1991 book "Homicide"]. There was no task force, no outcry, no publicity and no arrests in any of the murders. This is America. Nobody gives a good f--- about the poor. Not really.

Given the rough treatment that the modern-day Baltimore Sun receives in the first half of the season, I was a bit surprised by their cooperation with you to film there. Why do you think they agreed?
I think that having credited "The Wire" on their own pages with undertaking a serious examination of the city and its problems, The Sun would look hypocritical backing away from the show at the moment when the critique turned to the media. And I think they understood that while that we would criticize certain specific trends--out-of-town ownership, cost-cutting to the point of the destroying the news-gathering abilities of a paper, the prize culture and what that ultimately leads to in the way of hype and, on increasing occasion, outright fraud--this critique would be undertaken by ex-reporters (Bill Zorzi, me) who loved our years at the Sun and are aggrieved at what has befallen newspapers. We are not writing unsympathetically. There is a lot of ordinary and good journalism that is exalted even as Templeton betrays the ethics of the craft and is encouraged by newsroom leadership that is more concerned about Pulitzers. And there is some heroic journalism that transpires even amid the cutbacks that brutalize the newsroom. In short, I think The Sun knew they didn't have a good choice either way, but they understood that the critique would not be vicious. And I don't think it is vicious. I have friends at The Sun still; I believe in the idea of newspapers. And I don't think The Sun fares any worse than any critique of any number of second-tier papers would: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Philly Inquirer, the San Diego Union, the S.F. Chronicle, the L.A. Times. I think The Sun gets that it isn't exactly about them. It's about what is happening to newspapers nationwide.