Baltimore Sun's 'Wire' Portrayal Fuels a Hot Debate

The newspaper part of the plot involves a reporter who just might be making stuff up. Cost cuts and shortcuts at the newspaper have parallels at the police department, and both institutions flounder in their efforts to portray and protect.

What sparked Simon's online blast about Carroll and Marimow was a post on Slate.com by Deputy Editor David Plotz, who sounds like a fan but who said he was "praying that [Simon's] fury at the Sun won't overwhelm his genius for storytelling."

As fast as the reviews have been coming in, Simon has been e-mailing responses, provoking counter-responses and commentary on the commentary on the commentary. Jim Romenesko's Poynter.org blog, journalism's online water cooler, ran the mock-exasperated headline: "Write about David Simon and you'll probably hear from him."

Hyperlinks lead to hyperlinks lead to hyperlinks, until you get this on Fimoculous.com: "Vulture contested the copy-editing scandal, but today David Simon himself took issue with Vulture taking issue with David Simon taking issue with the word."

That refers to a bit in the first episode, where a grizzled rewrite man informs a callow cub that buildings can be evacuated, but "to evacuate a person is to give that person an enema." Well, the wags at New York magazine reported this out with a dictionary editor and found that since about World War II it's been okay to evacuate a person without emptying him. Correction, anybody? Simon countered that a real Baltimore Sun copy sage once lectured him on "evacuate," and that sage's name was Jay Spry, same as the character in the show.

Amid the drollery, scores are being settled, serious issues are being debated.

"Simon's portrait of Marimow is not just unfair; it verges on psychotic," Bill Wyman, who worked with Marimow at National Public Radio, writes in his blog, Hitsville.

Both Marimow and Carroll reached points when they stood against further newspaper downsizing. Marimow was fired from the Sun four years ago. Carroll resigned from the Los Angeles Times in 2005. "To parade Bill or me as some kind of cost-cutting agency of a brutish corporation is preposterous," Carroll says.

Last season on "The Wire," Simon named a loathsome member of the police department "Marimow." This year, the top editor of the fictional Sun says he came from a Philly paper, like Carroll and Marimow. When it is clear the fictional Sun is missing stories because so many beats are unfilled, the managing editor says with peppy cheer: "Simply have to do more with less."

Says Simon in his Slate post, "The Wire's depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions, passions or peculiarities of those who create it."

The theme of trying to do good work with diminished resources hits home in a lot of newsrooms. Between posts about "The Wire" are posts about cost cuts, corporate sycophants and layoffs -- at real newspapers.

Only 1.2 million viewers watched the first episode Jan. 6, the show's smallest audience for a Sunday premiere. About the same number tuned in this past Sunday.