Jimmy McNulty, the nominal star of “The Wire,” has always been the show’s weakest link. Roguish and principled, shambling and inconstant but, in the show’s parlance, “a real police,” he is a romanticized construct slightly out of step with the remarkable show’s otherwise rigorous portraits of deeply flawed humanity. Watching the show’s first two seasons again–getting reading for its fifth and final group of episodes, which premiered this evening–I was reminded again how he is always a bit detached from the grimiest of the police work. McNulty will falsify a time sheet, cheat on his wife, or get shitfaced drunk; he will fuck over a colleague, too, if a job-related principle is at stake. But he’s somehow never there when his colleagues file into an interrogation room to work over a suspect.

The reason is in retrospect obvious but it took me five years to realize that McNulty is the alter ego for the show’s creator, David Simon, and as such is protected, intrinsically, from such activities. (It’s possible that I’ve forgotten some heinous action in one of the other seasons, and even more possible McNulty will compromise himself this year, but it’s certainly true that the original conception of his character was sanitized.) Simon is himself a rebel; as we enter into his long-awaited portrait of the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper where he was a famously cantankerous reporter and learned on the streets about the city he would create his unforgettable tapestry of, we’ll see his take on the final civic institution that in his view make up the modern urban moonscape. (The others have been, in order, the police department and drug gangs; the unions; the political players; and the schools.)

“The Wire” lacks the operatic vision David Chase brought to “The Sopranos” and Chase’s adamantine eye for domestic bleakness; and Simon can’t match the scope of David Milich’s “Deadwood” (nothing less than the creation of American capitalism out of a stew of mud, blood and semen) or the Shakespearean cadences with which he limned it. But Simon’s own talents–the laconic, closely observed writing; the remarkable vigor of the plotting; the deeply humanist worldview that gives virtually every character a dignity and even charm–make it worthy company of those shows, which is to say among the very best pop culture of our era.

The first episode of the new season, however, shows a Simon off the rails in one key part of his story. Simon’s time at the Sun was not entirely happy, and he has been forthright about holding a grudge against the paper and its editors. Last season on “The Wire,” a police lieutenant was brought in to torpedo the special crime unit’s work; he was a weasely toad of a man, a patsy for the malevolent Major Rawls. His name was Marimow; insiders knew that this was a sidelong blast at one of the top editors of the Sun during Simon’s time there, whose name was Bill Marimow. The new season will flesh out Simon’s views of what transpired at the paper while he was there and his view of journalism. The first episode isn’t promising.

The first newspaper scene shows a group of older staffers griping about cutbacks; we hear that a top editor likes hiring comely young female reporters who have big eyes but can’t write. Later, the editor joins a daily news meeting; a remark is made establishing that it was unusual for the editor to have deigned to attend. There’s talk about a story about poor affirmative action progress at the University of Maryland. The editor tells the meeting that a friend of his at the J school told him that the university had improved in that regard, and delays the story for further reporting. The scene is a stark portrayal of a detached, stuffed-shirt executive deep-sixing a negative race-related story on the word of a white buddy of his. The editor, too, is based on Marimow, and is apparent that he will be a part of the forces that, in the view of “The Wire,” are rotting the paper from the inside.

In another key scene, one of those comely young reporters is dressed down by a couple of the older editors. She’s rapped for using the word “evacuate” wrong. You evacuate buildings, not people, says one. “To evacuate a person is to give that person an enema,” chimes in a loveable old copy editor. “At the Baltimore Sun,” he continues in stentorian tones, “God is still in the details.”

As the reporter walks away, he reflects, “What are we gonna do with these children today?” A few minutes later, the reporter holds a dictionary up to her face. “He’s right,” she says, marveling. “You don’t evacuate people.”

It’s a great portrait… doughty editors fighting to maintain quality in the face of a hierarchy of soiled ethics and a younger generation who can’t even write English correctly.

The only problem is that Simon is letting his personal demons mess up the integrity of his show.

Simon’s portrait of Marimow is not just unfair; it verges on the psychotic. Marimow won two Pulitzer Prizes as a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Sun during the time he and John Carroll were the top editors won another handful. (I don’t buy into Pulitzer fetishism myself, particularly, but it’s at least fair to mention in this context.) The Baltimore Sun, as part of the Times Mirror chain, was bought by the famously rapacious Tribune Company, out of Chicago, in 2000, which immediately began putting the screws to the Times Mirror papers, including the Sun. Far from being the corporate toady of the Marimow in “The Wire,” Marimow was summarily fired in 2004 after resisting those cutbacks in the face of the demands of a new corporate henchperson, Denise Palmer, sent out to Baltimore by Tribune. The character in “The Wire” last season should have been called “Palmer,” not “Marimow.” Simon’s use of his name is a violence against the truth.

The speech patterns of the editor who waved the meeting off of the University of Maryland story is dead-on Marimow. (Physically and sartorially, he seems to also incorporate a bit of Carroll, who went on to edit the LA Times and eventually was forced out by the Tribune company as well.) I worked with Marimow at National Public Radio after he left the Sun; I found him to be a professional of enormous rectitude and focus—a focus almost entirely on using resources for doing strong investigative journalism. The idea that Marimow would be greeted with surprise at an editor’s meeting is a canard; he made it a habit of walking around the reporters’ carrels in the NPR newsrooms; his door was literally always open (he refused to close it even for delicate discussions); and would spend untold hours working and advising on difficult stories. The implication that he would squash good stories, as opposed to relentlessly push editors to force better work out of their staffs, is absurd.

A bang-up fight I had with him came when he wanted to turn one of the editing positions on my staff into a reporter. I disagreed with him in that instance, and ultimately prevailed: Marimow was rigid, but you could always go three rounds with him, and he has that sort of intellectual confidence that allows him to change his mind when the evidence was there. All that said, I agreed with him on principle. Papers should always spend their resources on actual reporters on the ground.

Simon’s antipathy to him comes off as almost pathological. The implication that Marimow hired big-eyed female reporters is another big lie. What happened at the Sun is what happened at NPR; once situated, Marimow brought with him a steady stream of the top talent at his previous job. The griping at NPR was that a number of new hires came from the Sun. In every case the reporters we stole from the paper were superior. While I’m sure Simon was a good reporter, his gripes are those of a staffer at a second- or third-tier institution resentful of an influx of A-list talent.

And finally, about “evacuate.” That sequence is one of the most comically accurate representations of what is wrong with the American newspaper that I have ever seen, but not in the way Simon intended. The young writer is female, and Hispanic. She gets shouted over to an editor only to be told, publicly, she’d used a word wrong. A gruff old copy editor intones some gnomic wisdom to send her back to her desk.

But: She didn’t use the word “evacuate” incorrectly. There’s nothing in the world wrong with saying or writing “120 people were evacuated.” I have several editions of the Webster’s New World, the dictionary she holds up in the newsroom. They do not limit the use of the word in the way the show describes. The New World isn’t the best dictionary ever published (it found its niche by expurgating profanity from its word list and marketed itself to schools, libraries, and newsrooms), but it’s what the AP Stylebook is based on. The AP Stylebook doesn’t mention evacuate, nor, for that matter, does the NYT Stylebook. The American Heritage Dictionary, the most usage-obsessed dictionary in America, doesn’t restrict the word either. Nor does the Merriam-Webster collegiate. Webster’s Third, the definitive American dictionary, published in 1961, doesn’t make the distinction Simon does. I don’t have a 1934 Second Edition at hand, but the Collegiates I have that are based on it don’t restrict it either. Finally, the word doesn’t appear in Fowler.

Anyway, this is what I think is wrong with newspapers: they’re run by mean-spirited blowhards and genial old fuckheads who browbeat young staffers and minority staffers about small issues they know nothing about to obscure one big issue: That they have participated in the demise of their profession by being timid, blindered, and wrapped up in unions.

“The Wire” is a still a great show, but I’m glad Simon is no longer a journalist; he’s an asshole and a liar, and he doesn’t check his facts.