I was just catching up with the latest episode of “The Wire,” reading Salon’s coverage this morning.
For those of you who don’t follow the show and therefore never read about it, I’ll recap a running controversy - namely, that this season, creator David Simon is using the show to settle old scores from his reporter days at the Baltimore Sun. (Well, duh.)
Reporters are coming out of the woodwork to either 1) bash Simon 2) protect his old bosses or 3) say they worked for the same kind of weasels, and they know where Simon’s coming from. It’s quite the topic among the Fourth Estate these days (as opposed to, you know, writing about the criminal actions of the Bush Administration or the war), right up there with John Edwards’ haircut.
Anyway, I thought I’d put in my two cents. I do think Bill Marimow made some real improvements at the Sun (for one thing, it became a much more visually coherent paper during his tenure), but that doesn’t preclude him from being a soul-killing weasel. I’ve met my share of newspaper weasels in my day, and they’re never all bad - they wouldn’t be any use if they were.
But that’s not really the point: David Simon writes fiction.
For those of you who do not write it on purpose (I’m talking to you, national press corpse!), you may have trouble remembering the difference. I find it immensely amusing that Simon is being publicly cut from the journalism herd, as it were, for failures of reportage - when his job is to write fiction.
For you non-fiction writers, you have to understand that much of the joy of writing fiction rests in its Zeus-like ability to right (and re-write) old wrongs. While a character may, in every significant way, appear to be a depiction of a specific living person, it hardly ever is. It’s a surrogate for that person, or a person like him or her. It’s a device by which the writer works out his own ideas and feelings about someone like that - who isn’t actually that person. Writers can be monsters that way.
So to attack Simon for not getting the facts right is just plain silly. But then, so is much of what passes for journalism these days.
Simon has pretty much nailed it, so far, about the newsroom this season. Except that it should be in Philly. Marimow did a 180 when he came to the Philly paper. A lot of talent went out the door last year, by way of a layoff. This hasn’t received a lot of play but the entire suburban staff was eliminated, and all but one had 18-22 years seniority. Talented, responsible journalists working for half the pay, and driving their own cars to assignments. The guild and the company cut a deal that got around seniority, and so there are reporters with less than 6 years seniority that still have their jobs. A layoff that, we now know, wasn’t as dire as it was played out by the new owners. They hired four new columnists soon after, and none of them need the money, except maybe the out of work congressman. And last June, they supposedly found the money to put in a bid for Dow Jones. Arriving in Philly, Marimow became one of “them.” Simon isn’t writing fiction this season.