Of David Simon’s myriad cris de coeur about his time at the Baltimore Sun, the one that cries loudest is about a Sun reporter named Jim Haner. While he has gone unnamed in Simon’s recent writings and most of the commentary about Simon’s jeremiad against the paper in the current season of “The Wire,” it wasn’t always the case. In 2000, Simon was behind what is described as a lengthy article published in the October 2000 issue of Brill’s Content questioning the ethics of Haner. (Brill’s Content was a short-lived but to my mind engrossing and worthwhile magazine devoted to journalism and journalism ethics. It was founded by Steven Brill, the difficult but smart guy behind American Lawyer.) Haner, apparently much favored by Simon bêtes noires John Carroll and Bill Marimow, spearheaded the paper’s investigations into lead-paint poisoning, but was also used for various color pieces (more on which anon) and managed to catch the eye of local press critics after some high-profile mistakes.

I couldn’t immediately find Brill’s Content’s archives on the web, but the Haner story, from the tendrils left of it online, seems interesting. A few exhibits from the Baltimore City Paper, a not-unsubstantive alternative weekly:

* In February of that year, a press piece about an embarrassing correction/retraction of a story Haner co-wrote:

On Jan. 21, Gov. Parris Glendening visited Baltimore on a “fact-finding mission” about lead-paint poisoning, The Sun reported the following day. After “addressing community leaders” at a West Baltimore church, Sun staffers Jim Haner and Timothy B. Wheeler wrote, the governor “stepped into the crowd to chat” and “got an earful” from the Rev. Douglas Miles, a leader of the church-based activist group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD). “I told him two of my grandchildren have been lead poisoned in rental houses in the city,” the reporters quoted Miles as recounting. The event was front-page news, in keeping with The Sun’s drumbeat of commendable coverage of the city’s lead-paint crisis. The only problem was, it didn’t happen. There was no fact-finding mission; as the paper’s Maryland section reported that same day, Glendening was in town for a previously scheduled meeting with BUILD, a session taken up largely with addressing Baltimore’s drug problem. And far from giving the governor an earful, Miles says he never spoke with Glendening about lead paint that day.

(The Sun’s work on the lead-paint story, which isn’t available online, makes for great reading, incidentally. Here’s the essential thesis of the work:

After four years of often-contentious negotiations between doctors, property owners and children’s advocates, the General Assembly enacted a law in 1994 aimed at cutting down the state’s rate of poisonings.

The law, which took affect four years ago, requires landlords to register their properties and reduce lead-paint risks in return for protection from lawsuits. Lauded at the time as one of the strictest regulatory schemes in the country, it has accomplished little.

Maryland still ranks among the most toxic states in America, poisoning children at a rate more than 15 times the national average. And more than eight out of 10 of those children live in Baltimore’s slum neighborhoods.

The Baltimore City Paper piece also contains early echoes of one of Simon’s contentions against the paper:

This is, on the face of it, a severe breach of journalistic ethics. What’s particularly troubling is that this breach comes in the service of The Sun’s ever-more-vigorous program of self-congratulation. Thanks to several high-profile investigative series, the daily has become accustomed to affecting public policy, and its reporters and editors make sure to pat themselves on the back for that in follow-up stories. Readers have become mind-numbingly familiar with the phrases like, “The move came after The Sun documented. . . .” But then, such claims aren’t only for the readers’ benefit; they’re also directed at Pulitzer Prize judges, who place a premium on reportage that’s brought demonstrable results.

* A few months later, that correction and some other crimes earned Haner a short bitchslap of an item from the paper’s “Best of Baltimore” issue, under the ironic hed “Best Parallel Universe.” The piece also mocks his writing style, notably about a passage from a story Haner wrote about the Preakness: “Favorite Fusiachi Pegasus didn’t just lose by a neck after a rough ride; he was ‘[b]eaten in the buttery mud of Pimlico like a three-legged carnival pony with a belly full of hookworm.’” (Now that’s color writing! “The Wire” fans will note that the ambitious reporter in the show Simon is using as his Haner stand-in not-so-coincidentally earns a passing praise from the paper’s editor for his handling of a Preakness color piece.)

* Around the time of this item, the Brills Content piece was published. Again, I can’t find it online, but this third City Paper piece gives an in-depth account of it and its fallout in the Sun newsroom. It contains this passage, with emphasis added …

Much of the response to the Brill’s article has taken the form of angry, defensive polemics, with Sun scribes and editors endeavoring to discredit both Pogrebin and Simon while minimizing Haner’s acts as factual errors of the sort that every journalist makes on occasion. A weakness of the piece is its dependence on the accusations of celebrity journalist Simon, who left the paper on bad terms in 1995, and who approached Brill’s with his suspicions about Haner. Simon’s isolation—no other Sun writers would go on record with similar complaints—and his admittedly chilly relations with the paper’s current brass leave him open to questions about his own motives. It has been relatively easy for Haner’s defenders to dismiss the brouhaha as Simon’s problem, not Haner’s or The Sun’s.

… and for what it’s worth includes some strong support for Haner from other Sun editors. The writer, Tom Chalkley, sums it all up thusly:

As to whether Haner’s admitted missteps and overreaches are mere flukes or tips of an iceberg, I’m watchfully agnostic. I do give considerable weight to the judgment of editors—weighing, at the same time, the vested interest editors have in their best or most exciting writers—and I do believe that Pogrebin’s story suffered from some of the same tendentiousness Haner is accused of. When a reporter is charged with playing fast and loose with facts, it behooves the rest of us not to play fast and loose in assessing the situation. Particularly, we shouldn’t assume that Sun editors’ public defensiveness means that Haner wasn’t privately taken to the woodshed when his errors were uncovered. The guy has been reprimanded, publicly corrected, and now pilloried in a national magazine. Enough, already—for now. The real issue here isn’t about Haner—it’s about standards.

Reading all of these, one has mixed reactions. It’s worth noting that even the hostile City Paper doesn’t call for Haner’s head. On the other hand, the question left unanswered is what exactly Haner and the Sun’s explanation was for the original (quite rococo) Glendening error; how exactly did Haner come up with the bizarrely, pompously inaccurate contention that the governor had come to the city on that “fact-finding mission”? Was it something Haner wrote—or something, possibly, that crept its way into the story in the editing process as the editor and writer worked to tart the story up? (Once in a while, amidst ethical or error imbroglios at newspapers, the paper can be oddly uncondemnatory of the writer; the answer could be that there is joint culpability of writer and editor that makes it difficult to punish the writer exclusively.)

That aside, Haner’s no Stephen Glass. There were obviously screw-ups, but he’s also an unquestionably serious reporter. (Though I noticed the same year he was a Pulitzer finalist the judges in their wisdom gave the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter a prize for film criticism, which is not a good indication of their acuity.) It’s really hard to see how Simon with a straight face can cite Haner in the same sentence as Glass and Janet Cooke. That kind of talk is what is making Simon look like such a nut.