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

After a round of scheduled interviews arranged before the season began, Simon says he is declining further interviews in solidarity with the screenwriters' strike.

Whether or not they fairly allude to real people, the fictional journalistic villains and heroes seem one-dimensional to some reporters who've watched. But then, wouldn't members of the longshoremen's union have said the same thing about Season 2, which featured the Port of Baltimore?

There's one odd anachronism. The calendars in the fictional Sun newsroom all say 2008, but there's no talk of the online duties reporters have to perform nowadays to feed their papers' Web sites. The show is all about the next morning's front page. The fictional Sun sheds foreign bureaus, like the real Sun. The fictional buyouts, like the real one Simon took, cause veterans with deep knowledge of the city to be replaced by a smaller number of kids with a lot to learn. (One scene for this season was filmed in the real Washington Post's Style section, where an oh-so-superior fictional Post editor interviews an ambitious fictional Sun reporter seeking a job.)

"The show does not resemble the newsroom that I know," says Tim Franklin, current editor of the Sun. "Reporters and editors have never worked harder than they do now and never have worked under more ethical guidelines than they do now. . . . To suggest there isn't great work going on or that we have abandoned urban coverage is ridiculous."

Simon does not completely trash the business. He has gone out of his way to praise the work going on now at the Sun. In the show, the fictional city editor and some of his colleagues are still animated by the same almost impossibly idealistic passion to expose and reform that drew Simon and so many others to the craft in the first place.

"Tim Franklin is right," Simon says in a Romenesko post. "The people on the ground in Baltimore, though there are less of them, are doing the most to produce the best newspaper they can."

This season of "The Wire" may be one of the last serious dramatic treatments of a newspaper before newspapers are changed into something completely different. Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, hasn't seen "The Wire" before, but he's going to tune in this season.

"One thing you have to give David credit for is having the conviction to pull a newsroom onto the national entertainment stage," Kunkel says. "The average citizen needs to be aware of what's transpiring with the traditional gatekeepers of public affairs news. If the Baltimore Suns and the major papers like that go down in flames, we are all the poorer."