Standards and morale start to slip whenever money and resources dry up, especially in the newspaper business. I know first-hand that it's impossible to do "more with less" when you're working a beat that demands double shifts, lots of staff support and a strong personal commitment. Still, readers and publishers demand high quality work from newspaper journalists, even as they both seem to care less and less about the final product. It's a puzzling paradox. Daily newspapers are still largely seen by the public as credible news sources, but they're rarely bought or read anymore. Publishers want good stories and headlines that will fly off the racks, but they're unwilling to invest real time and money in their journalists and are more concerned with pleasing the corporate interests. David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire and a 12-year vet of the Baltimore Sun's police beat, knows all of this too well. It was only a matter of time until the plight of the modern newspaper journo made its way to The Wire.
The Wire has always focused on Baltimore's crooks and cops, giving both equal screen time, but most seasons add a new setting (the port, city hall, the classroom) that's directly affected by the action on the streets. With the first ep of the fifth and final season, Simon, who scripted the ep, begins to draw parallels between the Baltimore Police Department's overall downslide and that of The Baltimore Sun newsroom. Just like in years past, The Wire continues to deconstruct how and why formerly great institutions (cities, newspapers, families) start to crumble.
We begin season five with Baltimore's finest reeling from massive pay cuts and unpaid overtime thanks to Mayor Carcetti's decision to move funds to plug the school district's giant budget defecit. The cops are pissed and the city is less safe because of it. This becomes really apparent when Carcetti pulls the plug on on the department's year-long investigation into last year's unsolved string of murders. This sends Detective McNulty back to Homicide, but not before he gets tanked at the local pub with Bunk and crew. The broke cops hilariously try to earn credit at the bar with overtime slips and Herc, who now works in the private sector, ends up buying them a round.
Carcetti's decision to stop the investigation means the cops' tail on drug player Marlo is over, leaving Marlo free to expand his territory, much to the chagrin of Proposition Joe. We find out that dropping the investigation and slighting the cops might not have been Carcetti's best political move. He's looking like "a weak-ass mayor in a broke-ass city" as Wilson so bluntly put it.
We enter the Sun newsroom halfway into the ep. City editor Gus Haynes (played by the great Clark Johnson) has a telling conversation with two of his reporters, one that echoes those going on in newsrooms all over the country: The paper won't pay journos like it used to, it's cutting staff, hiring too many green reporters and standards are shit. One reporter wonders out loud what it would be like to work for a "real" newspaper. Once inside the newsroom we see what Haynes has to deal with: Dissilusioned vet reporters, lazy green reporters, a lack of manpower and higher-ups more interested in interpreting the news than reporting it. And, of course, he's told to do "more with less," a message Carcetti wants Major Daniels to relay to his demoralized detectives and officers. Haynes scores a hot story for the paper, nearly indicting the city for making a real estate deal with a known drug pusher, giving some reporters hope that they've finally found a story with "legs."
We drop in on Bubbles who seems more like a ghost than ever living in his sister's basement. We spend a few quick minutes with Michael, who's now running a corner for Marlo, and Dukie, who's still the object of ridicule on the street. I look forward to catching up with these compelling characters, but I wonder exactly how they'll get folded into this season's budding arc, which might be shaping up to be about political maneuvering and the media's role in public policy.
