David Simon’s star has fallen so low that when Newsweek does a story on him, it’s “online only.” (Link via Romenesko.) It’s an “exclusive Q&A,” too, which translates loosely as “the only online place Simon has talked to this week.” All that said, the writer, Devin Gordon, tries to get Simon to address some of the criticisms of the show, from the preposterousness of the faked serial-killer storyline to his one-dimensional newsroom characters.

The writer asks Simon if the cops’ falsifying evidence to create the killer has any basis in reality. Simon says it does—”We didn’t stretch it very far at all”—but he’s talking about a small bit of medical-examiner minutiae. And he continues to besmirch the integriy of the Sun editors he worked with, conflating his criticism of one reporter there with Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, which are fundamentally different issues. The rest of it is his usual blather.

Also:

• There’s a cover story from the Washington City Paper, which has had but a brief cameo in our story thus far. It’s about failures the writer, Mark Athitakis, sees in the fifth season of “The Wire,” problems he sees as a violation of a contract David Simon struck with viewers early on:

For the first time [… Simon’s] frustrations start to muck not just with the believability of his characters but with the rules of the peculiar social order he’s invented. One of the central arguments of The Wire has been that, despite various political and economic upheavals, despite all the futility in its world, characters stay relatively constant. Omar never points his shotgun at a citizen; Bubbles remains genial, self-sacrificing, and concerned with fair play regardless of whether he’s using; Freamon, who rode a soul-crushing job on the pawnshop detail for 13 years before earning a position worth his intelligence, takes his time and would rather fuss over dollhouse furniture than get involved in BPD administrative squabbles.

Simon has done serious damage to this premise this year in an effort to make his case against corporate media by giving money—or its lack—such character-morphing power. Money has always been short in The Wire—the angry God who made Simon’s Baltimore may well have first intoned “You’ll just have to do more with less” instead of “Let there be light.” But this time around financial concerns are strangely disproportionate, a wrecking ball that arbitrarily reshapes character. HBO has thus far only made seven of the season’s 10 episodes available to reviewers, and Simon may yet right the ship. But it’s thudding to a close, stuck in a stereotypically TV-like world it’s heroically avoided until now.

Athitakis is a former colleague of mine; his piece is worth reading.

• Meanwhile, over in the New York Observer, Tom Socca, who covered the Baltimore Sun as a media critic for the Baltimore City Paper back in the day, weighs in on the reality of the Sun during the Marimow-Carroll-Simon era. (Simon has targeted Marimow and Carroll as ethically challenged fancypants who played Pulitzer-inspired melodies on their fiddles while the Sun burned; others, like Hitsville, have heatedly defended them.) (The Baltimore City Paper isn’t related to the DC version, incidentally.) Here’s Scocca’s take:

The Sun that I covered for Baltimore’s City Paper in the ’90s was the Sun of Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow. It was redesigned and ambitious and on its way to Pulitzer glory. It was also a damaged and declining newspaper.

How can both those things be true? It comes down to a disagreement about the purpose of a newspaper. Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow’s Sun was a place for young, talented reporters to do ambitious stories. It was not particularly dedicated to covering the news in the city of Baltimore.

[…]

The tragedy of The Sun is that Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow probably did mean well. But they were brought in from Philadelphia by bosses in Los Angeles to run a Baltimore newspaper. Their idea of journalistic excellence was an institutional abstraction.

Scocca also gives his take on the Sun mini-scandal that animated David Simon so.

• David Simon talks with Nick Hornby in “The Believer.” Simon is at his best, Hornby at his worse. There is something annoying about people like Hornby, most of whose writing you have to admire, when they practice journalism—celeb scribes who write with a palpable species of insecure narcissism. Specifically, you get the sense that even when they are writing about someone else, every sentence they write is designed to polish their own self-image, which for some reason they always seem to think is in need of burnishing.

For example, here’s the lede graf of Hornby’s piece on Simon:

Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention. No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.

You can start with the inevitable subject of the first sentence (”I”); proceed to the obscure cultural reference, designed to show off the arch and sophisticated repartee in which he and his friends communicate; and then marvel as Hornby (this is my favorite part) gilds the lily by hammering home the fact that Hornby and his pals don’t traffic in the TV references others of the intelligensia might.

It’s quite a tour de force, made even better by the next graf, an extended discussion of Hornby’s own comparative take on the show: “[I]t struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison … ” It struck Hitsville that a quick Google search of “david simon,” “the wire,” and “dickens” might confirm this usefulness, which it did, revealing that … the comparison had already appeared on some 12,000 internet pages.

Anyway, when Hornby shuts up, Simon is just fabulous here, displaying his charms at their best. Who else beside David Milch talks like this?:

Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

And he gets better from there.

• From the Baltimore City Paper, a piece discussing whether the Baltimore Sun of “The Wire” is the Baltimore Sun of real life. In it, Simon, in his more self-delusional mode, says this:

“… [I]t has to take place in a world in which the internet is transforming journalism in the ways that it’s doing, in which buyouts and cutbacks and layoffs are a fundamental part of the industry,” he continues. “That’s happening nationwide. And in which there is a continuing concern over the–how should I put this?-over the priorities of out-of-town newspaper chain ownership. I think these are all legitimate criticisms that have to be addressed if the piece is going to be meaningful because these are the fundamentals in newspapering today.”

Emphasis added. But it is one of the crushing criticisms of the show this season that he addresses this issue not at all. To cite one of many examples where this is absent in the show, in the first episode Gus Haynes is allowed to act all exasperated because people are watching a fire and not covering it. In real life, the paper’s 24-hour internet desk would have had the story up immediately, with digital pics sent in from the scene soon after.

That Balt CP story, incidentally, was by Bret McCabe from earlier this month. He just posted an exasperated “Enough Already” piece.

• McHabe also noted an Onion sally into “Wire” humor, which falls flat. TV critics are the only people who watch “The Wire.”

• A blog on “The Wire” called “The New Package.” Spirited and supportive posts from a number of contributors. Lots of good links.
• A very, very long essay in Baltimore Magazine by David Simon himself, detailing a little bit of tsuris he got from the mayor of Baltimore after he started filming the third season. (Link via Romenesko.) That prompts a logorrheic defense of his show:

Is it too much for the other America to see itself reflected in one television drama, to have—amid all the wealth and beauty and self-gratification—a single viewing experience to call their own, a solitary drama that addresses itself to their world? The Wire is the one continuing series set in the shadowland of the ghetto, in the America that we have discarded politically, economically, and emotionally. Are we saying, that for the sake of Baltimore’s civic image, that it’s one drama too many?

Besides one cheap aside he stays away from the subject of the Sun, however, so it’s one of his least crazy public pronouncements in recent weeks.

• David Simon takes to print yet again, bloviating about a newspaper’s past glories in the Washington Post. What’s frustrating about Simon is that he’s only half wrong about a lot of things, but he exacerbates the issue by being such a noodlehead about what he’s right about, and being such a jerk about what he’s wrong about, that I personally can’t take him seriously.

• That said, see also this: The David Simon journalism test!

• David Carr in the NYT slices up Simon’s newsroom fantasies here, but nicely.

• Jack Shafer does the same thing in Slate, a lot less nicely. Personal to D.S.: Warning! Contains actual facts about the newspaper industry!

• 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.”

• Hitsville’s original position paper is here, with episode updates chronicling the ongoing car wreck in episode two here and episode three here. Yet more here.

• A discussion of the reporter the thought of whose nefarious deeds keep David Simon up at night to this day is here.

• Salon’s weekly discussion of the show continues here.

• Slate’s TV club continues here.

• In Huffington Post, John McQuaid zeroes in on the confusion of Simon’s beef with newspapers (via Romenesko):

I don’t get The Wire’s “Sun” plotline. It’s interesting. I want to see where the show goes with it. But its diagnosis about what ails the business doesn’t make sense.

David Simon seems to have taken a bunch of industry trends and put them in a blender with an admixture of his own resentment and nostalgia. And what came out, in contrast to the show’s amazingly cool, disciplined eye for every other aspect of urban society, has so far been the worst possible thing for a drama, both preachy and sentimental.

• 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. There’s also a bonus Simon freakout, somewhat denatured by boundary issues on Bowden’s part.

• Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker profile.

• 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.)