I was flabbergasted when he pointed out that the entire point of the media section was how out-of-touch it was with the rest of the plotline. It seemed like every complaint about the show ever written had just turned around and reinforced its message.

Quite deft.

I was flabbergasted when he pointed out that the entire point of the media section was how out-of-touch it was with the rest of the plotline. It seemed like every complaint about the show ever written had just turned around and reinforced its message.”

But in some ways I think this was a bit too clever. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to make a point that the real issue was what the media wasn’t covering. I think they did that, but it had several shortcomings. First of all, I think they let the Templeton piece distract them. That got a little too much of the newsroom time. But more important, we never saw the effects of what the media wasn’t covering. The effects of the failures of all the other institutions are demonstrated, we see what happens when City Hall, the Schools, the police department, are stuck in bureaucratic inertia; we see how it harms society on a whole. While I personally get how the failures of the media to be thorough and cover the most important stories have a negative impact on society, I don’t think they did a good job showing it. It seemed like an isolated problem that wasn’t connected to all the other institutional failures.

About 10 years ago I was working for the Univ. of Maryland and someone there had David Simon, an alumnus, come speak when his book the Corner was released. It was a great talk. He wasn't nearly as well known then so it wasn't packed and there was plenty of time for questions.

Simon got his start when he worked for the campus newspaper and covered a scandal involving a basketball player. The player had possibly assaulted a woman on campus and the coach, Lefty Driesell, had phoned the woman to suggest (or possibly threaten) that she drop the whole matter.

Simon, as I remember, heard tapes of the call and thought to himself, "This is it. Lefty's done for this time." But, of course, Lefty wasn't done for. He survived and Simon said the lesson he took from breaking this story and finally seeing that it didn't change anything on campus was that you just put the information out there. It's not the journalist's business to worry about the outcome or what should happen. He can only make the information available.

I haven't watched the Wire at all, I'll catch it on DVD, but Simon seems disillusioned with the newspaper business, believing they no longer even get the facts out there, regardless of the effect that has.

It's funny, after I read about David Simon saying that the point was that the newspaper missed or under-reported the real stories going on, I thought back to the first episode of the season and the scene with the three reporters standing around, looking at the smoke from the fire, but no one going out to report on it. Other points of this popped up throughout the season, right up to Zorzi muttering under his breath at the mayor's press conference. I think most of us got caught up in the fabulist, just the way Gus did, and missed the real stories. And we missed the fact that all of these things that we'd been watching over the last five seasons weren't "news". When Nick Sobotka crashes the mayor's press conference, even the mayor doesn't know who he is or why he'd be so upset. Gus is as guilty of this as anyone else, though the cutbacks give it context. All of the energy he spent running down Templeton's lies could have been spent getting to the real story, but it wasn't.