The Wire, Episode 52 "Unconfirmed Reports"

Double Down · Jan 15, 2008

Actually, I believe I said we probably shouldn't make sweeping judgements based on seeing only the previews. I still have faith, but after seeing a few episodes and reading more interviews with Simon, I'm wondering just how big Simon's grudge is.

That said, I wish Bill Marimow would stop telling every reporter that calls him that Simon is like Ahab chasing a white whale. Seriously, I've seen him quoted saying this like six times. We get it, Bill.

JR · Jan 15, 2008

The whole Simon feud with his former editors is getting really tired, really fast.

Yeah, we get it Simon. You were Mother Teresa and they were all idiotic dickheads.

Talk about pre-launch publicity and hype.

FootballScribe · Jan 15, 2008

Double Down said:

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:

SEASON ONE
The scene: McNulty interviews a witness to the killing of a man nicknamed "Snot Boogie," who was shot after robbing the local craps game once too often. When Jimmy asks why they kept letting Snot play after he robbed them a time or two, the surprised witness explains, "Got to. This America, man."
The theme: America and all its institutions are now so fundamentally committed to business as usual that they keep letting their own equivalents of Snot Boogie into the game, since that's the way it's always been done.

SEASON TWO
The scene: McNulty, banished to the marine unit, is reminiscing about the defunct factories that once ringed Baltimore's harbors when he gets a distress call from a party yacht that's stalled in the shipping channel. The tux-clad host bribes Jimmy to let his swanky pals continue their soiree unmolested.
The theme: Season Two deals with the disappearance of American industrial life, as seen through the eyes of the barely-employed union men on Baltimore's docks. McNulty's run-in with the party boat shows how a place like the harbor, which once provided steady employment to the city's blue collar citizenry, has now become just another playground for the rich.

SEASON THREE
The scene: Dope slingers Bodie and Poot witness the demolition of the high-rise towers where they once worked, and discuss how often Poot caught social diseases from a girl there. ("Don't matter how many times you get burnt," Bodie says. "You just keep doin' the same.") The high-rise implosion inadvertently fills the surrounding streets with dust.
The theme: Two, two, two themes in one! As Bodie and Poot's boss Stringer Bell and police commander Bunny Colvin each try - and fail - to change the way their side of the drug war does business, Bodie's words foreshadow the pointlessness of attempting reform. Meanwhile, Stringer's partner Avon Barksdale gets caught up in a pointless war with rival Marlo Stansfield, which becomes an Iraq war allegory; the high-rise implosion and its aftermath are framed to evoke 9/11.

SEASON FOUR
The scene: Snoop, one of Marlo's chief assassins, visits a hardware store in search of a new nail gun. A salesman, not realizing Snoop intends to use the device to seal up her many victims in abandoned homes, gives her an elaborate lesson on the value of powder-actuated nail guns.
The theme: The focus shifts to a Baltimore middle school and how the city school system isn't preparing many of its students for anything but life on a drug corner. Snoop's conversation with the hardware salesman is the first lesson of many where the student takes away something entirely different from what the teacher intended.
Click to expand...

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.
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So, I made it a point this summer to catch up on this show since I had heard so many terrific things about it. I fell in love with in just a few episodes. Reading your take on makes me wonder what I was missing out on more, the show itself or your excellent analysis of it. Thanks for checking in with this, I'll look forward to it each week.

Double Down · Jan 15, 2008

Thanks FBscribe.

All of you be sure to check out this Esquire piece I posted over on the J-Board. It's Simon's lament about what happened to the Baltimore Sun.

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/essay/david-simon-0308

StormSurge · Jan 15, 2008

FBscribe (& others), the show holds up really well on repeat viewings. Also, the commentary is fantastic. There are tons & tons of interesting tidbits to each episode.

Dedo · Jan 15, 2008

Double Down said:

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.
Click to expand...

Wow. That point seems so obvious, so self-evident, and yet in all of the column inches of magazine features, newspaper stories and blog postings I've read about this season, I've never seen anyone have the good sense to point it out until our man DD.

My question to you is this: Do you think Simon realizes the magnitude of the discrepancy between the newspaper world he left and the environment that exists now? If he does, and chooses to ignore it to chase his "white whale," then that's pretty disappointing. But I'm not sure he even understands how outdated his perception of the newsroom is.

Write-brained · Jan 16, 2008

Dedo said:

Double Down said:

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.
Click to expand...

Wow. That point seems so obvious, so self-evident, and yet in all of the column inches of magazine features, newspaper stories and blog postings I've read about this season, I've never seen anyone have the good sense to point it out until our man DD.

My question to you is this: Do you think Simon realizes the magnitude of the discrepancy between the newspaper world he left and the environment that exists now? If he does, and chooses to ignore it to chase his "white whale," then that's pretty disappointing. But I'm not sure he even understands how outdated his perception of the newsroom is.
Click to expand...

The special they did, "The Last Word", talked a lot about the internet's impact on newspapers. I figured the show would get into that as well, but like you say the nets haven't even been mentioned.

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The Wire, Episode 52 "Unconfirmed Reports"

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