The Wire, Episode 52 "Unconfirmed Reports"

something else that bothered me about sunday's episode. this reporter who they're building up as the stephen glass-like character goes to camden yards to talk to people about opening day, but nobody's talking to him so he just gives up and makes up this E.J. character in the wheelchair? what kind of worthless-ass reporter can't get SOMETHING useful for a story outside the stadium on opening day? all the guy's doing is a setting-the-scene piece for god's sakes.

they made it not like he was lazy and never even went out there, like in some of the previous real-life cases. he's there and gives up and starts making shit up out of desperation. that just didn't ring true to me, but maybe I'm being naive or too critical. seems to me like they're going to too-great lengths to set up how big of a weasel the guy is. he'd have to be at least a reasonably decent reporter to have made it as far as he has, i'd think. surely good enough to put together the simple piece he was originally there to do.

 

To me, it felt like he was trying to come back with too good of a story. Didn't want to disappoint the ME/EE and all, since they had just finished praising him for his work. In that sense, fabricating the story rang true (with obvious faulty judgement).

 

Yeah, my entire screen is filled. Not an inch left unused.

 

No one is getting The Wire in HD, because it wasn't filmed that way. There are rumblings in Internetland that filming it in HD would have been too expensive, which is sad, but makes sense because HBO has never proven to be very committed to the show.

Footballscribe, if your entire screen is filled, that's either because your TV has the old-school 4X3 dimensions, or your HDTV is in stretch mode.

If anyone needs any further confirmation of this, check out HBO's official schedule below (scroll down to the HBOHD listings about halfway down). Notice how all of the shows in HD have the "True HDTV" symbol, and The Wire doesn't.

Edit: forgot to add the link.

http://www.hbo.com/apps/schedule/ScheduleServlet?ACTION_DATE=UpdateCalendar&DATE=1/20/2008

 

As for the episode itself, I thought Sepinwall did a pretty good job of covering the thematic bases. But one thing I've been struck by is how well the newspaper scenes have encapsulated the message of the entire show. In almost every scene Gus is in, it seems like he's talking about Stringer or Marlo or Bodie or McNulty, even though he's never met any of them.

Take this exchange from outside the Sun, after Scott comes in with the story about the dead mother:

Jeff: "Tough gig, mother of four."

Roger: "Innocent bystander is worse, he's always getting the short end."

Gus: "Not a lot of them around anymore. Not a lot of innocence, either, if you ask me."

 

Probably the case. It doesn't look as good as HD shows, but I don't have any edges. Certainly not an old TV, I'll see what setting it's on.

 

Fellow Wire-o-philes,

Sorry I've been absent from the discussion thus far. Instead of digging up the "More With Less" thread, I guess I'll dump all my thoughts from the first two eps here, then try to catch up on "Without Attribution" later.

As we've said before, the opening scene of each season is supposed to set the tone for the year, and it's always more interesting in retrospect because usually the message is subtle and understated. Alan Se pinwall did a pretty excellent job summarizing what each scene represented, so before making my point, I'll post it here:

This year, we have Bunk, Norris and Landsman using a scene ripped directly out of David Simon's book, Homicide, which was published in 1989. Using the copy machine to trick the one suspect into essentially agreeing to cooperate against his buddy (who as several people expertly pointed out, provides the perfect connection to Season 4, because Monell was one of the kids who asked Randy to watch the door while they had sex with a classmate. The schools can't deal with these kids, and soon enough they end up in the Game, facing a murder charge.)

I guess my initial problem with this whole sequence, other than I think should be a bit beneath Simon to repeat himself so blatantly (as others have said, it was also a scene in Homicide, the TV show), is not only the lack of subtlety in Bunk's point ("The bigger the lie, the more they believe...") but that I'm not so convinced that the kids of 2008, the ones with cell phones, Trios, iPhones, etc., would be so easily fooled by a trick that cops used in the mid-1980s. Urban kids may be ignorant about a lot of things (the scene where Bodie, who had never been out of Baltimore, couldn't understand why his favorite radio station faded out on his drive to New York and so he ended up listening to Prairie Home Companion in Season 2 was a perfect example of this) but I seriously don't believe they would be that ignorant about a copy machine. In the 1980s, absolutely. But anymore? Feels like a stretch.

Some of this ties into my main quibble with the season thus far -- though because it's about the media, I'll concede that my objectivity may be clouded a bit. Simon has posed the question repeatedly in interviews about what the focus of this season will be: Why are we not paying attention to the stuff that truly matters? It's obvious he feels that the decline of a once great American newspaper, and the people responsible for that decline, are to blame. We have two prize hungry editors, a spate of buyouts contributing to a serious drop in newsroom morale, and a reporter who is willing to fabricate a story to get ahead being treated like a star as a result. It's obvious that Scott Templeton, the reporter, is based on former Sun reporter Jim Haner. If you want to read more about his various misdeeds, you can do so here.

To answer djc3317's point, Haner was accused of doing exactly what you said. Half-reporting a story, not getting what he wanted, then "juking the facts" to make it better. Before Blair and Glass, he was the subject of a lengthy piece in Brill's Content where Simon raged against him for "flat-out making shit up." John Carroll and Bill Marimow defended Haner, and Simon has never forgiven them for it. So overall, I think it's not hard to connect the dots of what may happen (and I say this only having seen two episodes): Eager to get a job at the Washington Post or the Times, Templeton will buy into McNulty's bullshit about a serial killer in Baltimore. Someone killling white people. (J-Tub, over on Foxsports.com, keeps floating the theory that Omar will be framed as the serial killer, but I don't buy that, and also think Whitlock is full of shit on so many things, it's impossible to take anything he says seriously anymore.) What starts as a small lie will become a much larger one. Stories of actual importance, like Baltimore's homeless problem, drug problem, schools problem, murder problem, labor problem, will be ignored. Editors dreaming of Pulitzer Prizes will defend this poorly-sourced nonesense, and in the end, some people will be exposed, but the shell game of deal with crime, politics and police work will continue.

Here is the rub though: Simon left the Sun in 1995. His wife, Laura Lippman, left in 2001. Like the copy machine, he's telling a story that happened 15 years ago, but telling it in the present tense. That would be fine were it just a story, but part of the tragic brilliance of The Wire is that so much of it is grounded in truths that never change. But newspapers have changed drastically since Simon left them 13 years go. Almost criminally. Ambitious editors and full-of-shit reporters aren't what's killing newspapers, and thus contributing to the sad decline of an American city. Corporate ownership and the Internet are what's killing them. The Sun, The LA Times, The Philly Inquirer, the Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and News, and a tons of others (including, even, the NYT and Wash. Post) are in decline because people no longer view them as a public trust, as something we need to survive in order for democracy to survive. And we keep making them worse by making them cheaper (while arrogantly saying "We're as good as ever!"), accelerating the problem. One of the things that struck me too in the episode about the city council giving the drug dealer a sweetheart deal was that there was no debate at all about "Should we get this up on the web right away?" something that now happens in every metro newsroom in America. "Do we hold this for tomorrow's paper or give it away for free right now, giving in to TV, radio, our competitors and our readers for free, even though it was our heavy lifting and institutional knowledge that made is possible?"

I find it somewhat ridiculous that Simon has said, in numerous interviews, that he always figured he'd be the guy who grew old on the copy desk and bummed cigarettes from young reporters, spinning tales about everyone from Jack Germond to H.L. Mencken. I don't believe David Simon believes that for a second. I think it fits into the "David Simon: Hero" narrative, which is what he would like to believe. It's romantic. (Gus Haynes, the City Editor, is obviously David's idealised version of himself. It surprises me that more people haven't made this connection.) But anyone with the grand ambitions that he has never dreamed of marrying himself to a newspaper for life. He was always meant to write books and screenplays and question authority and reach for something much bigger. And good for him for not only believing that, but doing it.

John Carroll and Bill Marimow were both fired from their jobs for standing up to the Tribune Co., which wanted them to make cuts in the newsrooms of LA and Baltimore and both were chewed up an spit out like Frank Sobatka, Bunny Colvin, Stringer Bell, and Bodie Brodus all were when they refused to play ball with the institution. Wouldn't that be interesting examination of things? To show that even the evil editors who didn't totally get it (in Simon's mind) couldn't stand up to the crushing weight of capitalism when trying to do what they thought was right? Ultimately, the institution always wins, no matter how moral, immoral, courageous or cowardly you are.

Obviously I have high expectations for the final season of the show, so I'm interested to see how it all plays out. But I'm worried that Simon's anger and hero complex has distracted him from completing his masterpiece properly.

 

I agree... I never felt that was in the McNulty we have gotten to know pretty well.

 

DD, once again, you've outdone yourself.
And you're absolutely right, a portrayal of Carroll and Marimow as powerless against the machine, a la Bunny Colvin or Frank Sobotka, would be brilliant, and probably far more true than the caricatures we've seen so far (though I'd note "the bosses" in The Wire rarely get such sympathetic treatment). I've read somewhere among all the trees slaughtered in analysis of this season of the Wire that Simon has said this won't be a simplistic portrayal of newsroom life, essentially that it won't be a black and white smearing. So far, of course, it is, and that's what makes the newsroom stuff rather disappointing.
But maybe there's a turnaround coming. Perhaps all Simon's purported rage against two of the most respected editors in journalism is tempered by the knowledge that they're a lot better than the alternative (and, really, there's a lot worse things to say about an editor than that they want to win Pulitzers). Maybe by the end they'll be as fleshed-out and multi-faceted as most of the other characters he's created.
One can hope, anyway.

 

Thanks, STLIrish.

I forgot to mention my favorite line of the episode:

"Jimmy, Fish and Fucking Wildlife couldn't help your ass right now."

 

I gotta re watch this episode, but Bunk's reaction to Jimmy tampering with the evidence was something.

DD, that review was better than anything I could have read online or in print.

Oh, do you think it was by chance that they were printing out the kid's responses? The kid was *reading* what he thought was true, and it just might have been true, but it was done with malice; kind of like a rotten newspaper story.

 

DD, you assured me on the other thread that this wouldn't happen.