David Simon continues to let his personal demons degrade the quality and integrity of his unforgettable TV show, “The Wire,” which had the second episode of its final season tonight. Until these last weeks, the show’s most noticeable weakness was the visualization and a lot of the casting of the dockworkers-union thread in season two: A few of the stevedores’ scenery-chewing seemed out of place in the show. Now, however, we have the ongoing train wreck of Simon’s working out his grudges against John Carroll and Bill Marimow, two editors from his years at the Baltimore Sun. The two cases he’s building involve a) editors focusing on winning Pulitzer Prizes and b) the same editors allowing a reporter with patently substandard work to get undeserved prominence in the paper.

A) is a classic example of the horseshit Simon is peddling. As I said before I think Pulitzer fetishism isn’t all that interesting and am willing to concede the point that some editors are Pulitzer-obsessed. But how is this relevant to the decline of the American newspaper? Such national recognition can help a paper market itself to its community, earn it beneficial publicity, and do its community some good. It’s another example of Simon taking professional differences of opinion and turning them into battles of good vs. evil.

Worse, the particulars of the dispute in the newsroom tonight make Simon seem even more out to lunch than he did last week. His stand-in here, an intrepid city editor (whom we saw last week intrepidly lecturing a young female reporter on the usage of a word he was entirely wrong about), tries to argue against an investigation into the Baltimore city schools, on the grounds that the societal forces surrounding the kids were much greater than the effects the schools had. The stuffed-shirt editor overrules him, ruling that the series stay focused on the schools.

The sequence betrays Simon’s knuckle-headed politics. I think the reason newspapers don’t do series on the larger societal forces hitting kids is that it’s a dog-bites-man story, which is what the top editor was trying to explain to the heroic city editor. Folks know that poor people have it bad, that they have crummy home lives, absent or uncaring parents, lousy nutrition and no role models. Most people are smart; they understand that, for better or worse, we live in a capitalistic system that screws over a significant chunk of the society for some greater good. They don’t need a newspaper series to tell them that. But both in theory and practice a powerful series that focuses on a particular wrong can improve things. Simon scoffs at such talk, which is another example of how he can’t be trusted to discuss such matters rationally.

As for b), there is by Simon’s lights a scandal at the Sun involving a certain reporter, a pet of former top editor Carroll, who, according to Simon at least, had several stories retracted. Here’s Simon’s contention:

Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow are notable journalists with impressive resumes. They have done some fine things, I am sure. But in Baltimore, in their hunger for prizes, they tolerated and defended a reporter who was making it up wholesale. Events, quotes, meetings at which people were supposed to have spoken powerfully about The Sun’s powerful coverage of a Pulitzer-worthy issue but never said any such thing — it was simply farce. Yet even after that third retracted article, they continued to defend the behavior as the honest mistakes of a good, aggressive reporter.

[…]

I grew up a newspaperman; I do not know how to regard newspapermen who would go out of their way, over a period of years, to continually retract stories by the same reporter and continue to defend such. And so, when I meet other journos, I am full-throated in a way that everyone still in the game never manages to be when it comes to a yet-to-be-outed Blair, Bragg, Kelley or Glass. These scandals keep coming one after another and everyone pretends that they are aberrations, that the only guilty parties have all been caught, that there isn’t an underlying and fundamental problem with prizes and ambition and accountability that is inherent within the shrinking pond that is print journalism.

I don’t know who the reporter is he is talking about, or what the true story is. I do know that Simon’s version of it in the episode of “The Wire” tonight is so heavy-handed as to be completely unbelievable. The episode features a young reporter who goes to a baseball game and comes back with a feature story about a kid in a wheelchair desperate to see the game—except he doesn’t have the kid’s name, a picture, or any identifying details. In the show, the stuffed-shirt editor waves away the city editor’s concerns about the sourcing of the story.

The stuffed-shirt, as I’ve noted before, is an amalgam of Carroll and Marimow. I’ve seen Carroll in action only at a distance, but again, I worked with Marimow for some time at NPR and I remain taken aback at the way Simon impugns his integrity. In previous posts I referred to it as a big lie technique, and this is another example. At NPR Marimow was positively rabid on the subject of not using anonymous quotes save in a very narrow set of circumstances. It’s possible this is one of Simon’s hobby-horses with Carroll, but it’s hard to imagine any editor of Carroll’s stature being so cavalier, at least in the crayon colors Simon is drawing in. (While reasonable people can argue over the use of anonymous quotes in varying circumstances, their use is famously lame in the situation presented here, at a public event with literally tens of thousands of other candidates for quotation.)

Much of the rest of “The Wire” remains taut and engaging. (Though the latest plan of Simon stand-in McNulty is worrisome.) But if Simon’s Baltimore Sun story arcs remain so crude, the legacy of the show will be permanently besmirched.