Comment is free: Ink-stained wretches: “But as The Wire plunges headlong into its fifth and final season, those layers of sloppy kiss print coverage have not been reciprocated by the show’s creator, David Simon.
Quite the opposite, in fact. Much of The Wire’s new season grapples with the American newspaper, a once-glorious enterprise ransacked by a dismal convergence of investors’ heedless and rapacious pursuit of double-digit profit and a tectonic shift in media technology. It’s a storyline rooted in Simon’s experiences as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun from 1983-995 – and his unhappy departure from that paper during its precipitous decline in ambition and prestige.
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.”