Reporting on The Wire

I start from the presumption that The Wire is the best thing ever broadcast on television. Or, as Charlie Brooker has it, “the best TV show since the invention of radio”.

Amusingly, this view is almost universally shared among critics, who get rather excited by its sprawling, novelistic structure, political subtext and morally interesting characters.

If you haven’t yet read enough breathless praise for the show, set in inner-city Baltimore and described by creator David Simon as a “treatise on the death of America”, take a look here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

In joining this orgy of worship I am conscious of appearing tediously predictable, but what else am I to do?

Having toured and tackled Baltimore’s drug trade and cops, dockworkers, politicians and schools in seasons one to four, the spotlight shifts in the fifth (and final) to the role of the media.

My particular interest here, as someone with a background in (British) newspaper reporting, is how effectively the show captures life on a regional paper, and whether it illuminates any interesting differences between British and American journalism.

Some of you will have sped through every episode after downloading them offa the internet. But for anyone doing it the old fashioned way, tuning in weekly through the medium of broadcast television and a cable channel they are calling FX, I’ll confine my comments to the two opening instalments...

Simon, the genius creator, was well placed to create The Wire’s version of the Baltimore Sun, or the “Baltimore Sun”, as I should probably call it to avoid any legal action, since he worked for the real one for 12 years.

I should point out that the Sun’s circulation, 232,000, is more than five times larger than any paper I have worked for, so comparisons are potentially pointless. Still, here goes.

In episode one, we are introduced to the Sun’s editorial staff as they discuss fears of imminent job losses. This theme of cost cutting – an international challenge to good journalism – provides a backdrop to the corner cutting that will come later.

If it’s not “buyouts” or “pay-offs” (voluntary or compulsory redundancies), which so often signal a paper's decline, in real life as in The Wire, it’s the quiet but steady phasing out of positions as people move on and aren’t replaced, piling extra pressure on surviving staff.

We soon learn of the managing editor’s fondness for employing younger reporters. Although there is a salacious edge to this suggestion, the reality is that “all them 20-somethings” are cheap to hire and easier to fire, which is why – along with the erosion of pay – the average age of newsrooms is, in my experience, falling.

I knew an incredibly experienced and effective veteran reporter who was outrageously forced out for costing too much.

Inevitably, younger reporters are also less experienced, in an industry in which experience counts – a point demonstrated in The Wire soon afterwards when it takes an old hand, with the kind of local knowledge that can only be built over time, to spot an important story in a city council agenda.

Later on in the first episode, we learn that the Sun has missed a good transport story after the management failed to replace the paper’s previous specialist transport reporter.

This triggered memories of a daily paper I worked for that for a long time refused to appoint education, local government, transport or crime reporters, preferring the cheaper option of leaving general reporters or trainees to muddle along as best they could.

Trainees, by the way… £10k for a 50-hour week, anyone?

The Sun plot in the first instalment of The Wire culminates in a depressingly familiar statement from the managing editor, Thomas Klebanow, who tells staff: “Editorial cutbacks shouldn’t affect our ability to put out an excellent product. We simply have to do more with less.”

Reminds me of that other favourite management adage, wheeled out to demand ever more stories from a shrinking pool of reporters to cover for their own (under)staffing (mis)judgements – “You need to learn how to manage your time more effectively”. What are we supposed to do – freeze it?

Central to the Sun storyline is Gus Haynes, a dedicated desk editor (in the UK they’re called news editors) who has to organise the paper’s reporters, draw up a list of stories and go into the daily news conference to persuade the editor they’re worth publishing.

Gus is clearly meant to be the principled one, battling against the incompetence, ignorance and shortsightedness of the paper’s management. Some have suggested his straightforward saintliness, which contrasts with the moral ambiguity of most of the other main characters, threatens to undermine the show’s complexity and authenticity. Whatever. He helps to highlight the problems of low-cost journalism.

In an unrelated side note - the bored silence with which Sun staff greet the "two-car fatal on the beltway and two overnight murders in the city" on Gus's news list demonstrates how Baltimore’s press, or perhaps the media of large American cities in general, have come to wearily accept murder as part of the fabric in the same way we in Britain might tolerate council tax.

The Wire also seeks to document the growing obsession of newspaper editors with "prize journalism" – those all-important Pulitzers – implying that reporting on a budget leads managers to look for simple, attention-grabbing controversies rather than seeking a fuller explanation of complex issues, something the British press has been doing very well for years without Pulitzers to play for.

Again, in episode two, Gus is the good guy, arguing for the importance of “a lot of context” in examining the city’s failing school system. I found this a little strange, since in my experience it has always been the news editors – the British Guses – who push constantly for stories to be boiled down to their basics, stripped of unhelpful detail or complexity, perhaps not for a prize, but in the interests of simplicity and readability.

But the prize chasing is clearly a big issue in the States, where there have been several high-profile scandals of reporters caught making things up to secure a scoop (as opposed to making things up and getting away with it, as happens in the UK, where there are weaker rules of attribution and fewer checks).

The show's producers set out to explore how far things might go when managers turn a blind eye. So an implausible exclusive by ambitious young reporter Scott Templeton is splashed on the front page on the order of the paper’s executive editor, despite Gus’s protests.

The story, about an orphaned 13-year-old wheelchair-bound gun-victim truant who can’t afford a ticket for the major baseball game, is published despite the absence of a name (other than a nickname – E-Jay), an address, a picture or indeed any identifying details at all.

I don’t see how this could happen in the UK, not least because agencies or rival papers would soon be chasing up the details for their own version of the story. It would be too risky. The most likely outcome would be a bollocking for the young reporter for failing to bring back anything useable.

Despite appearing to commit its own occasional exaggeration in the interests of a compelling story, The Wire provides some truthful insights into the life of a newsroom. I would hazard that the budget pressures on smaller daily papers in the British regions are even more intense than in the States. On a provincial rag here you certainly wouldn’t be told, as one Baltimore Sun reporter is in a later episode, to go and spend “a couple of weeks” researching a story about a heroin addict. You’d be lucky to get a couple of hours.

But the most important point of the show's exploration of the media, spelt out by Simon himself in a forceful comment piece here, is that failing to invest in journalism leads to what one British writer has dubbed “churnalism”, and that means the important stories don’t get told. If you haven’t already, get your teeth stuck into The Wire.

* The third episode of the fifth season will be broadcast on FX on Monday Aug 4 at 10pm.

Going nuts for The Wire…

"An obscure jewel to be snatched from TV's outflow pipe." - The Guardian

"If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it." - New York Times

"The Wire makes The Sopranos look like The Waltons." - Jim Shelley