After the season’s first episode aired, Simon responded to Slate’s TV Club discussion of the show by saying: “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.” Well, he’s had his on-screen say. And all it did was nearly ruin one of the best shows on TV and prove that David Simon has either no clue or simply nothing interesting to say about the very real, very serious problems facing newspapers in 2008.

Earlier in the season, I wrote of Season 5′s Baltimore Sun storyline: “So far his ‘multitude of problems’ are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.” Six episodes later, that’s still The Wire’s diagnosis. And one moment from the finale crystallizes both the storyline’s unreality and Simon’s apparent cluelessness.

In the closing montage, we see plagiarist Scott Templeton on stage at Columbia University receiving a Pulitzer Prize along with his two evil editors. This plot development is absurd because, as Ann Friedman writes at the American Prospect,

it seemed completely unrealistic that, presented with the evidence, the higher-ups at the paper would turn their heads and ignore Templeton’s plagiarism. Their defense of Templeton made sense up until this last episode — until Gus presumably laid out all the evidence. But even with a Pulitzer on the line, I find it pretty unbelievable that they would just let it all stand.

And because, as David Plotz writes at Slate:

No editor would willfully ignore evidence of a reporter manufacturing stories the way The Wire‘s Sun editors do. It would never be worth it. The New York Times and Washington Post would trade any number of Pulitzers to wipe the stains of Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke from their histories.

And because, as Andrew Johnston writes at The House Next Door, the show’s Pulitzer moment means that

every single person we’ve met who’s on Gus’ side and who has doubts about Templeton—including the Metro, Regional Affairs and State editors, who are all at least Gus’ equal on the masthead and some of whom may be above him on the food chain—every single one of them is a wuss who’s so scared of losing his or her job that they’re willing to let Gus take the fall.

For a show that’s supposedly so realistic, this is plain bad storytelling. But as an indictment of modern newspapers, it’s even worse — because it shows just how little Simon grasps the implications of the Internet.

In the real world of 2008, Templeton simply could not have gotten away with his lies — let alone won a Pulitzer. Plotz writes at Slate, “As we’ve seen this week with the pair of faked memoirs, fabulists get caught.” If the Sun plot were taking place in a real-life newsroom today and evil editors ignored a city editor’s warnings about a possible plagiarist in their ranks, he wouldn’t just take his lumps and demotion to the copy desk in silence. He would e-mail Romenesko, or Jack Shafer (who has just written two columns flagging instances of a reporter’s plagiarism), or Howard Kurtz, or the Pulitzer committee (who would surely take any warnings seriously after the Janet Cooke fiasco). To take a recent real-life example, a week and a half ago blogger Nancy Nall Derringer discovered a White House official had plagiarized a Dartmouth Review essay in a column for an Indiana paper. The official resigned within 12 hours — after the post got picked up on other blogs and other sleuths discovered more plagiarism.

But just as Simon doesn’t seem to grasp that the Internet is the root of newspapers’ non-fictional problems, he doesn’t grasp that the Internet also would have prevented his plagiarist from getting away with it for so long. This is newspapers’ challenge in a nutshell: the Internet has broken their monopoly on distribution, so anyone can be a journalist now and bring down a White House plagiarist, and readers don’t need the physical paper to get the news. This may be bad for newspapers, but it’s great for journalism. More people than ever are reading smart, important journalism because of the Internet, and more shoddy journalism and plagiarism is flagged — even as the Web makes it harder for newspapers to survive in the form they’ve taken for decades.

None of this has anything to do with the newspaper industry depicted in The Wire.

Now, Simon of course argues that the newsroom story does have a deeper point. In a long interview with the Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall, Simon says:

The main theme is not the fabulist and what he is perpetrating. That’s the overt plot. The main theme is that, with the exception of the bookends — at the beginning, the excellent effort at adversarial journalism that begins the piece in episode one and the genuine piece of narrative journalism that concludes it, with Bubbles — it’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season.

If that’s the case — if the gutting of a paper is truly the focus — why does the Templeton story take up 90 percent of the Sun plot while the big missed stories — the deaths of Prop Joe and Omar — are 10-second mentions that only close watchers or recap-readers would catch? Simon also cites Clay Davis’ prosecution as an overlooked story, which fair enough; that’s explicitly presented as a case where staffing cuts led them to miss the story. But Davis has presumably been in office for years — plenty of time for a previously non-gutted newsroom to have done some investigative reporting on the state senator. If the reporters in the fictional equivalent of Simon’s day had done the kind of reporting he implies was done back in the real-life day, even an eventually short-staffed newsroom would have found a way to keep an eye on the biggest political crook in the state (wait, I forgot — the fictional Sun only has five reporters).

In the Star-Ledger interview, Simon goes on to dig himself a deeper hole:

What I’m loving, it makes me warm all over, is that a lot of the obsession of journalists in the evaluating … (isn’t that theme) but whether Whiting is as big an a–hole as Valchek, “Is Gus more of a hero than Colvin?,” “Do they have to put suspenders on that guy?,” “I can’t believe any editor would say that,” “Why would Alma drive all the way over there?” I’m loving it. It’s this onanistic, self-obsessed world of journalism — which is the problem.

Right, that’s definitely journalism’s biggest problem these days: onanistic, self-obsessed navel-gazers like David Simon. To the extent that people have noted some of these minor things, it’s because they are the details that betray Simon’s failure. The fictional editors do speak in journalistic cliches. Alma would have just checked the Sun’s Web site — or logged into the Sun’s computer system at home — instead of driving to the plant to see how her story got played. Again, for a show obsessed with realism, these are tellingly unrealistic details. Simon is ignoring the many extensive, smart critiques of his journalism plotline, just as he’s ignoring the many relevant critiques of real journalism.

Simon gives one brief nod to the Internet in the interview:

This was a story about a newspaper that now — on some fundamental basis — fails to cover its city substantively, and guess what — between out-of-town ownership, carpetbagging editors, the emphasis on impact journalism or Prize-culture journalism and, of course, the economic preamble that is the arrival of the internet and the resulting loss of revenue and staff, there are a f–k of a lot of newspapers that are failing to cover their cities substantively.

Never mind that the Internet, to my recollection, is mentioned exactly zero times on the show. It’s also worth repeating that his model for the show’s “carpetbagging editors” are the universally (except by David Simon) respected John Carroll and Bill Marimow.

One last point: It’s fashionable these days to bash journalism awards, though Simon certainly goes further than most in blaming prize-grubbing for newspapers’ problems. But have a look at some recent Pulitzer winners. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal won for “its creative and comprehensive probe into backdated stock options for business executives that triggered investigations, the ouster of top officials and widespread change in corporate America.” The Birmingham News of Alabama won for exposing “cronyism and corruption in the state’s two-year college system, resulting in the dismissal of the chancellor and other corrective action.” The Boston Globe won for “revelations that President Bush often used ‘signing statements’ to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.” In 2006, the Washington Post won for its investigations “of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that exposed congressional corruption and produced reform efforts” and for its “persistent, painstaking reports on secret ‘black site’ prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The New York Times won for its “carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune and Sun Herald of Mississippi won for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. This year, the Washington Post is sure to win for its exposes of Walter Reed Medical Center’s shameful treatment of wounded veterans.

Do these sound like empty “prize-culture” stories to you? They don’t to me. They damn sure are “impact journalism,” though I’m not sure why that’s a pejorative in David Simon’s eyes. Would he be happier if the Post hadn’t written the Abramoff and black sites stories for fear of prize grubbing? If the Times-Picayune hadn’t risked its journalists’ sanity by serving as a lifeline to readers and simply continuing to function after Katrina? If veterans were still routinely housed in mildew-filled rooms because Anne Hull and Dana Priest didn’t write their stories? Yes, plenty of deserving stories don’t win awards. Yes, some less-than-earth-shattering feature stories have probably won Pulitzers. Yes, some resources are probably wasted on occasional journalistic equivalents of movie Oscar moments. But for Simon to imply that Templeton’s plagiarized homeless fluff could actually fly amid these winning entries today is an insult to the many great journalists who aren’t backing down in the face of the industry’s problems.

I’m the last person to peddle false journalism nostalgia. These great Pulitzer winners aren’t going to save newspapers. But I, like many others, am actually trying to do something about it. So to the long list of the industry’s real problems, I would add: supposed champions of journalism who use once-in-a-lifetime cultural megaphones to bitch about 15-year-old personal grudges.

I believe my fiancee said this three times (though it might have only been twice) during this week’s episode of The Wire. It’s getting hard for me to stop pausing/snorting in frustration, I guess.

The most annoying thing about the episode was the Clay Davis courtroom scene. First of all, it sure seemed like they were in and out of a major political corruption trial in a single day. This wasn’t even narrative compression, as far as I could tell. Davis arrived on the courthouse steps in the morning, and stood on the same steps that afternoon as an exonerated man.

Secondly, what kind of prosecutor — a state’s attorney, no less! — puts a major political figure on trial for corruption without concrete evidence that he used his position to take bribes that enriched him personally? That is, when Davis gives his big speech about how sure he takes kickbacks, but he gives it all back to the poor folks in his district so they can buy winter coats and food, why doesn’t Bond come back at him with receipts for Davis’ BMW purchase, the deed for his Eastern Shore estate, or whatever other extravagances to which Davis surely has helped himself?

Bond seemed to build his case around donations going into Davis’ charities, followed by the exact same amounts showing up in Davis’ bank account. So when Davis says “But I gave it all away to my needy constituents by the time I walked down the street,” you’d think a good prosecutor would have solid evidence to be able to say, “No, you didn’t — you bought a $5,000 umbrella stand and a private jet” or what have you. Or at least to say, “Nice act turning out your pockets, Senator, but how does that explain the $2 million you still have in your bank account?” Maybe Davis would have won the jury over anyway. But as it is, it just seems like the state’s attorney is a moron.

Now, if this were a normal (i.e. good) Wire season, I would chalk that up to David Simon showing that Bond is paying the price for arguing the case himself as a potential launching pad to the mayor’s office, rather than taking it to the feds like Freamon wanted. But Bond is too smart to present a bad case like this. And since this is the season where everything is a joke, it’s probably just another bad piece of writing.

But one thing they didn’t mention that annoyed me is how the show’s fictional Baltimore Sun apparently has the smallest reporting staff of any major metro paper in the country.

Remind me if I’ve missed any, but in six episodes we’ve been introduced to: the oily Stephen Glass wannabe; the hungry idealist (who we’re supposed to feel sorry for, for example, when she’s rebuffed yelling a question to police officers while they’re working a murder scene); the young black reporter who seems generally normal; the state courts reporter upset that there’s no federal courts reporter; and the bearded, well-meaning but average City Council/education reporter. (Also the smarter-than-Batman cops reporter-turned-editor who was fired or took a buyout.) At first I attributed this narrow focus to the limits of narrative television; they can focus on only so many characters before the story gets unwieldy.

But in this week’s episode, when the evil editor — who you can tell is horrible because, like Stalin, he wears hoity-toity suspenders — declares that all their resources will henceforth be devoted to The Homeless Problem, the saintly city editor is upset because he has to reassign … the oily dude, the idealist, the courts guy, and the ed reporter (the black reporter seemingly can continue covering other things, because he brings in a tip from another story that’ll probably end up trapping the fabulist). That is all.

First of all, no editor — even one who has as much sanctimony as he lacks a clue — would reassign his entire staff to one subject short of a 9/11 type catastrophe. But beyond that, a few episodes ago we learned that the Sun is closing down its foreign bureaus. Are we supposed to believe that a big metro paper that recently had its own foreign staff now has fewer reporters than the 20,000-circulation paper in New Hampshire where I had my first job? Is there really no one left to cover education or anything else after these four or five reporters have been reassigned?

Also, David Simon has complained about how newspapers don’t do a good job of covering society’s systemic problems, or simply can’t cover issues with such scope. Intent and method of coverage aside, is it so bad that the evil editor wants to cover the homeless more? Isn’t a major American city’s chronic homelessness a systemic social problem worth examining? Obviously throwing resources at a made-up story about a made-up serial killer isn’t the right way to do that, but the topic itself is presented as frivolous (e.g. Mayor Carcetti latching on because it’ll help him become governor). Seems like something worth covering along with, if not as much as, the problems in the school system.

what is happening now is something new, something more serious than anyone has experienced in generations. Last year started badly and ended worse, with shrinking profits and tumbling stock prices, and 2008 is shaping up as more of the same, prompting louder talk about a dark turning point.

Most of the evidence is nothing new: circulation keeps dropping; print advertising is falling (especially real estate ads) and online advertising both doesn’t make up for that loss and isn’t growing as quickly as it was; “Job cuts have become all but universal.”

But then there’s this, about three-quarters of the way through:

Newspaper profits remain healthy, but they are dropping fast. For example, the newspapers of Media General, a large Southern chain, had a 17 percent operating profit margin last year, but the dollar amount fell 23 percent from the year before. The Gannett Company’s newspaper division, the nation’s largest chain, had a 21 percent margin, but a 10 percent decline.

Excuise me? I baking powder? Profits are healthy, Gannett has a 21 percent margin — and the fuss is about what now? You want real economic doldrums? Check out the auto industry. Ford lost $2.7 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion the year before — and those aren’t just losses in market capitalization (that was probably a heck of a lot more), but $15 billion in actual money down the drain. Think they wouldn’t kill for that 21 percent margin? (Their 2007 margin: minus-6.8 percent.)

Obviously Wall Street only cares that Gannett’s profit fell 10 percent from the year before, not that the company is still making money. And Gannett and Media General undoubtedly maintained those high profit margins by cutting some (or a lot of) news space and firing some (or a lot of) people. But I wish these kinds of stories did a better job of putting the gloom in at least some perspective. In a great New Yorker column a couple years ago, James Surowiecki did just that:

(N)ewspapers remain a surprisingly robust business and generate tremendous amounts of cash every year. Most of them have profit margins that dwarf those of the average company; McClatchy’s operating margin last year was twenty-eight per cent*, while ExxonMobil’s was around sixteen per cent, and the typical supermarket’s is around four per cent. The reach of newspapers remains huge. Daily circulation is around fifty-five million (not including online readers), giving the industry more customers than any other traditional media outlet. And those customers have the kind of demographics that advertisers like; even as circulation has dropped, revenue from print ads has stayed healthy, to the tune of more than forty-seven billion dollars last year. Newspapers are classic cash cows: solidly profitable businesses in a stagnant industry.

(*McClatchy obviously no longer has 28 percent margins, partly thanks to its purchase of Knight Ridder. But replace McClatchy with Gannett and the point still holds.)
Now, Perez-Pena seems to be arguing that a coming tipping point will make Surowiecki’s observation moot, that the cash cows’ multiple stomachs will collapse. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor!) But Perez-Pena’s casually tossed-off “Oh, by the way things may not actually be so bad” makes the rest of his piece unpersuasive.

As does the graphic that accompanies the story. First, the graphic shows that the newspaper industry still has circulation revenues greater than $50 billion and ad revenues greater than $40 billion. More significantly, the graphic shows that while Media General and New York Times Co. had respective ad revenue drops of 9.1 and 4.7 percent in 2007, Lee Enterprises — which owns more than 50 local papers — only had a 1.1 percent drop in ad revenue. Yet the story quotes a Bear Stearns analyst who claims local advertising has fallen while national ads are doing fine: “Local advertisers have been swallowed up, and there are just fewer,” Alexia Quadrani said. “Your local pharmacy becomes CVS; your local hardware store becomes Home Depot.”

How can this be if a local newspaper company fared much better than the six national media companies whose figures the Times reported?

Like the Times video game article I dissected the other day, this story tries to extrapolate a blunt trend from some numbers without really considering all that’s going on here — instead of trying to make sense of the very real problems facing the industry and figure out what the heck we can do about them.

At Slate’s TV Club conversation about Season 5, David Plotz annoyed David Simon by referencing brief conversations they’d had at parties in which Simon bitched about the Baltimore Sun. Simon criticized Plotz’s post, concluding: “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.” This is what I wrote to Plotz in a solidarity e-mail after Episode 2 or 3:

Fair enough. But so far his “multitude of problems” are a) Too many Stephen Glasses, b) Pompous idiot editors too dim to see the clearly telegraphed Stephen Glasses and disinterested in getting at the root of social problems, and at a distant third c) Corporate cost-cutting. That is all.

Forget that a plague of fabulists isn’t (to my knowledge) currently destroying journalism from within, and that the problem with real fabulists is they aren’t usually transparent fakers right from the start. This is his grand diagnosis of the ills of modern journalism?

How about, I don’t know, the Internet? Or hemorrhaging ad sales and circulation (partly or largely because of the Internet). Or figuring out how newspapers can appeal to readers and stay relevant in this new competitive-media world. Newspapers are going through their most dire period of upheaval in decades and he thinks the issue is too many fabulists?

The problem with his portrayal isn’t just that Simon’s fictional newsroom seems like a caricature of a mid-90s newsroom. It’s that, despite his response to Plotz’s TV Club post, he so clearly framed his fictional view based on his “past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities.” What a coincidence that his grand statement, via The Wire, on modern journalism’s failures happens to exactly coincide with his oft-stated feelings about his former editors and how they dealt with (or didn’t deal with) a fabulist and stories about social issues at the Baltimore Sun 15 years ago.

Jeffrey Goldberg voices similar frustrations in his TV Club post today:

We were meant to be getting a sophisticated look at the demise of daily journalism, besieged by the Internet and by venal media companies. Well, what we’ve got is a newspaper edited by a pair of impossibly shmucky editors who seem, in 2008, unaware of the existence of the World Wide Web and who have in their employ a reporter who is doing something no fabricator, to the best of my knowledge, has ever done: manufacturing information about an ongoing homicide investigation. Put aside, please, the fact that said investigation is a sham as well; the reporter, Templeton, doesn’t know that. Is this what David Simon really wants his viewers to believe happens at major newspapers? Is he that blinded by hate for the Baltimore Sun?

For such a supposedly brilliant guy and show, it’s depressing that the answers to the last two questions seem to be yes, and yes.