The Wire: “There’s some shameful shit going on” The Wire and the death of journalism

IF THERE is one storyline that touches me deepest in The Wire, it is Series 5 where the systematic deconstruction of the Baltimore Sun’s influence in the city is facilitated by a management eager for prizes rather than ‘the truth’.
Attention grabbing stories, however spurious, badly researched and written, are lauded by senior management while job cuts see staff with extensive contact books and years of experience taking buy-outs.
Creator David Simon announces his intent with a fairly simplistic metaphor midway through the opening episode of the series.
As city editor Gus Haynes (pictured right, played by Clark Johnson), a former crime reporter turned desk man, comes back from a smoke he notices two editorial staff in the conference room watching a fire in West Baltimore.
He asks if either have called the crime reporter – neither have. His reply, “Who watches a fire? There’s some shameful shit going on round here,” gets to the heart of the meta-narrative that runs, often unseen, through all five series: corporate journalism is watching as itself - and the communities it is supposed to serve – are burning and dying.
Simon admitted at a talk with USC students (available on youtube.com) that it is a simplistic visual metaphor but he couldn’t help himself.
Perhaps the simplest of messages have the most power and by the end of The Wire we are left in no doubt about the complicity of the institution of journalism in the degradation of society by the other institutions of civil society.
It chimed with me when I first watched it because at the same time something similar was happening on the newspaper I last worked on.
Older staff with great contacts books were being let go, desk men and women who taught me how to maintain the spelling, stylistic and ethical standards of the paper were leaving for poorer newspapers, becoming PRs or taking redundancy. These were people who helped me grow-up (very quickly) and gave me the kinds of values Haynes instils in junior reporter Alma Gutierrez in series five.
The result now is that the newspaper I worked on is becoming a vessel for press releases.
In recent history that newspaper broke incredible stories of civic corruption thanks to the contacts of the council reporter. One of the most recent crime reporters has written an award winning expose of one of Europe’s biggest drug dealers who came from our city. He has, needless to say, left sometime ago feeling unloved and overlooked for senior jobs given to lickspittles with a tiny sliver of his talent and news sense.
The days of his kind of expertise are gone because it costs too much. As the outgoing crime reporter says in The Wire, it costs a whole lot less to put out a poor newspaper which no-one reads than trying to get a quality product on the streets.
The news hole is shrinking thanks to the internet and we have to do more with fewer staff.
Ironically, by commanding remaining staff to fill more pages with lifestyle nonsense, we have never said less journalistically in the history of our industry.
Through job cuts and redundancies we are literally rendering ourselves impotent journalistically while patting ourselves on the back for saving shareholders overheads. Nero is the obvious, clichéd parallel and I’m not good enough to ignore it.
There is little or no real analysis on the newspaper I worked on and less investigative reporting on hard news issues.
Poor (celebrity) columnists and their knee jerk reactions to trifling headline grabbing national stories are our puerile stock in trade now.
Communities we served are ignored largely because we have no-one of experience to get out and speak to them as it costs too much. We are in thrall of blogging about what we had for dinner rather than about what’s going on in the lives of the people who live in the areas we should have sworn to uphold.
If The Wire (Series 5) tells us anything, it is that the historic role of the regional newspaper as a watchdog on corruption and crime, civically, is dead.
It also shows us that management, hidebound by delivering cuts to satisfy share holders are, at best, unable to avert this catastrophe. Perhaps more pertinently, at worst, they are unwilling to thanks largely to self interest.
Man, I’d have loved to have worked for Gus Haynes, he’d have been a righteous dude to have gone into war with in conference. He’s the journalist we’d have all loved to have been.

The Wire: A twisted love story to a city and its people

It's The Wire week on GM

If the underlying conceit of The Wire is essentially socialistic, that the venality and greed, in all its guises, of corporations, civic institutions and the drug trade is killing the city of Baltimore - then there is one burning high note.
That is the belief, of the creators and writers, in the spirit of the city and many of its inhabitants to be reborn.
The Wire is cynical in the truest form: it protests at how bad things are because it shows just how good they could they can be.
While many characters are brutalised and become almost feral in their pursuit of power, wealth and influence, at the core of the programme are a handful of shining beacons.
Among others, The Deacon (played by former real life heroin lord Little Melvin Williams), to the gangster-turned-boxing coach Cutty, to top cop Bunny Colvin and Miss Donnolly (assistant principal of Edward J. Tilghman Middle School) these characters are quixotic outposts of hope and belief in the human ability to change.
They mirror the work of Miss Ella who runs the nursery in the Wire’s HBO mini-series precursor, The Corner; community workers investing great bundles of emotion and optimism in the face or overwhelming disappointment.
In many ways the moral barometer of The Wire is Bubbles, played wonderfully by Andre Royo (pictured above right with Wire creator David Simon). He is a troubled but immensely likeable and intelligent junkie trapped in the all-consuming grip of drugs and their trade.
Bubbles may be a chronic drug addict but he has an acutely and righteously tuned moral compass which illustrates the wider complex morality at work in the programme. There is no real good and bad, just shades of whatever colours those vague concepts may be represented by.
It’s a terrible cliché, but, his prison is his addiction. The bridges that addiction has helped to burn with his family and the suffocating reach of drugs, both spiritually and geographically in Baltimore, conspire to offer him no obvious means of escape.
We watch Bubbles’ multiple bids for salvation from the abyss and they mirror Baltimore’s. We watch how cops, friends, outreach workers and reformed addicts reach out to him and how he reaches out to other addicts in a bid to leave this world.
It takes 60 hours of viewing to resolve itself, though, ultimately nothing is ever that morally simplistic in the world of The Wire.
It is nevertheless, addictive TV. Utterly compelling, vital and paradoxically, uplifting.

The Wire: A treasure of the modern age

GM is celebrating the news that the BBC has announced that it is to show all 60 hours of The Wire.

IN the last series of The Wire a routine in-joke repeats itself: editors ask reporters of the Baltimore Sun to examine the Dickensian nature of the education system and then homelessness problems of the city.
It's an in-joke between the creators and writers because the Dickensian nature of The Wire was one of the great praises sung of the show by critics exultantly reviewing early series.
They ultimately pointed to its often very gradually unfolding, novel-like plotting as the central pillar of its vast panoramic illustration of inner city Baltimore in decline.
It is the very novelistic, episodic nature The Wire that sets it apart and allowed it to achieve what many TV shows have either failed to do or just clean ignored - classic entertaining drama as a dense political treatise.
The only comparable example in Britain has been Our Friends in the North and even that is merely a super-charged mini series, albeit a bloody brilliant and era-defining one.
The Wire has a set of principle players augmented by many, many supporting members of an extraordinary ensemble, giving the drama an acute sense of place, community and time.
In many ways it mirrors the work of some of its key writers: the novelists Denis Lehane (Mystic River), Richard Price (Clockers) and perhaps most closely, the work of executive producer and crime writer, George Pelecanos (pictured above right with Wire creators Ed Burns and David Simon).
Each writer documents their places of birth, Lehane in Boston, Price Brooklyn and Pelecanos in Washington DC.
Pelecanos, a fellow resident of the Maryland suburb of Silver Springs with Simon, is the creator of several wonderful novels which document the decline of inner city DC from the 1940s through to the present.
The recurring set of characters in The Wire mirror the recurring neighbourhood characters in his Nick Stefanos and Derek Strange books.
Characters from different series often make brilliant cameos in other books which tickle the reader no end. But they act not merely as a post modern in-jokes, they also give a fictive but tangible representation of the living communities of Washington DC in the same way as happens in the West Baltimore of The Wire.
In The Wire, people live and die on the drug corners, they exit and re-enter the narrative often in different series.
We see people grow-up and fall victim, become rehabilitated and fall again and become brutalised by the harsh realities in the ghetto.
The Wire is epic, not in the way that Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond describe some £300,000 super car, but in the sheer scope of its scale and sense of social purpose.
It is rightly called epic because it is on the heroic narratives of Greek drama and Russian fiction that it shamelessly styles itself.
What an aspiration for TV drama to have in the first place. But to achieve that ideal, and then some, makes it a treasure of this often trivial modern age.