The Columbia Journalism Review has a notable feature story on David Simon’s journalism demons. Exactingly reported, large in scope, and well written, it plumbs powerfully the obsessions that have compromised the fifth season of Simon’s TV show, “The Wire.”

The CJR makes a strong case for Simon’s humanity and his bravery in describing the obvious big picture others are scared to call attention to:

For an exposé of a failing police department, [the Simon Baltimore Sun series] “Crisis in Blue” is remarkably free of villains. The reader finds not just individual actors making bad decisions, but a fatally flawed system that those actors struggle to accommodate. Reporting from the front lines of the war on drugs taught Simon everything he needed to know about that system. “How can you report on a place like Baltimore, where one of every two black males is without work,” he said, “and in any way regard the economic structure as being viable?”

The story also contains this powerful passage:

The complex Baltimore of Boyd-Booth is the Baltimore that Simon has chosen to document, and his reporting on the streets revealed to him the “wire” that eventually informed The Wire: it threads through both “our” lives and “their” lives. Simon believes that we’ve agreed as a country that our economy can thrive without 8 to 10 percent of the population. Thus, in his view, those without the education and skills to get by are inevitably going to turn to the only viable economy in their neighborhoods—the drug trade. To contain that problem and its attendant violence, he believes, the war on drugs has morphed into a war on the underclass. In both the viable and unviable America, Simon argues, capital is more valued than human lives, whether you’re an expendable tout in a drug organization, a cop trying to put good police work over statistics, a stevedore trying to pull in a full week of union wages, a teacher trying to educate rather than teach to the test, or, as the new season of The Wire argues, a reporter trying to capture the complexity of urban life rather than haul in sound bites.

But that’s all just setup for a detailed look at his relationships with John Carroll and Bill Marimow, the two Baltimore Sun editors who have become his obsession. I wrote about this here. I’m not the only person who has found the Sun plot strand discomfiting. Here’s my friend David Plotz, writing in Slate:

I’m a little worried about the Baltimore Sun plot. I’ve had two brief conversations with David Simon—he’s a friend of a friend—and my wife has had two long ones. In all four of those exchanges, Simon demonstrated an obsession with the Sun that bordered on monomania. There Hanna and I were, slobbering to him about Omar, and Simon kept changing the subject to stories that his editors had screwed up 19 years ago. I’m praying that his fury at the Sun won’t overwhelm his genius for storytelling.

The CJR story is quite fair to Simon, but for every sniping, strange example he uses of how Carroll and Marimow didn’t see things his way, the editors can site one-two-three-a dozen stories they did pursuing Simon’s same ends. Simon comes off … small.

But that’s his right. My problem with him, as I described below, is that he’s adopting big lie techniques. Journalists like Marimow and Carroll worked literally for decades in the trenches doing the hard stories, and then, once achieving management, risked their careers (and in Carroll’s case, had them ended) standing up again corporate budget slashers. It’s wrong—it’s morally wrong—to portray them in a precisely opposite way; as editors who squashed good stories, or who functioned as corporate toadies, which is how they have been portrayed in “The Wire.”

I was surprised at Bill Marimow’s comments about Simon in the CJR story:

A few days later, I visited Marimow at the Inquirer, where he recently returned as the top editor. He hotly defended Carroll as a gentleman and a stellar journalist. “He owes John an apology,” Marimow said. “He really does.” Marimow didn’t find the Stoop story self-effacing. “At the end,” Marimow said, “where he says, ‘Well I really feel sorry for Bill because he had prostate cancer, and I don’t want him to die’….To me all that stuff is utter, unmitigated bullshit. It’s cowardly, it’s dishonorable, and it’s nettlesome. I’d never say that about anybody.”

As I said, I worked with Marimow for a while at NPR and I was surprised to hear the unfailingly courtly editor speak with such vehemence. It’s true: Marimow doesn’t speak like that. Simon himself was probably happy to read that passage, thinking that he’d gotten to Marimow. But I think it’s worth pointing out that he’s not mad about the attacks on himself personally; he, like me, is mad at the idea of someone in our profession twisting the truth so elaborately, just to settle a personal score. That’s something any journalist must find disturbing.

Simon isn’t saying, “I had a million fights with my editors and I hate them as people. But I must say they had their own agenda for excellence in journalism and, in the end, both got their asses fired standing up to the Tribune Company.” He’s recklessly trying to besmirch their reputations using stories that he knows are not true.

If you’re interested in the Simon saga also check out:

Mark Bowden’s essay on Simon and “The Wire” in the new Atlantic. Many levels of irony here, not least that the writer is a friend of Carroll’s and Marimow’s.

Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker profile.
The Slate TV Club with John Swansburg, Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz
Hitsville’s essay on Simon’s Sun obsessions and his odd understanding of the usage of the word “evacuate”
David Folkenflik’s NPR report.

The NYmag.com item on Simon’s “evacuate” issues … and Simon’s wacky response. (Link via Romenesko.)

The Ubiquitous Marketing blog, including thoughts from PRWeek exec editor Keith O’Brien, and a long response from Simon, mostly about remarks David Plotz made in Slate. (Ditto.)