Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
If you haven’t been watching – and listening – to the heated debate about the latest TV portrayal of an American newspaper, you should start. The Guardian has this story about the controversy generated by the newest season of The Wire, an HBO series that has gotten a lot of critical acclaim. The story revolves around characters in Baltimore, and this year it includes a harsh view of what’s happening in newsrooms:
It is surprising is that it has taken so long to create a snappy dramatisation of the decline of US newspapers. Television’s last serious look at the business was CBS’ Lou Grant – which aired from 1977-1982, an era when “stop the presses” still meant, literally, stop the machines that print the newspapers.
But what’s completely predictable is that only a scant two hours into the show’s last 10 hours, media types were already in full-on “cover your ass” mode: nitpicking story arcs and portraying Simon as “angry.”
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News flash: The fact that The Wire is not a documentary (or even that it’s not “evenhanded”) doesn’t diminish its power or its authority. As The Wire did in its brilliant depiction of Baltimore’s dying docks in its second season, and in its bruising examination of public schools in its fourth season, the show’s depiction of the American newsroom is etching the moral compromises made in that space and the plunder of the fourth estate by plutocrats vividly in the public imagination.
It is an ugly portrait because what’s happened to America’s newsrooms is ugly. Ugly enough to make anyone angry. And it’s predictable that Simon’s media critics would indulge in fits of self-justification and messenger-killing.
But if they really don’t like his snapshot of America’s depleted and dispirited newsrooms, maybe they should get angry enough to help change those newsrooms – and not the channel.
Pick up on it.
