The Angriest Man In Television: “Behold the Hack, the veteran newsman, wise beyond his years, a man who’s seen it all, twice. He’s honest, knowing, cynical, his occasional bitterness leavened with humor. He’s a friend to the little scam, and a scourge of the big one. Experience has acquainted him with suffering and stupidity, venality and vice. His anger is softened by the sure knowledge of his own futility. And now behold David Simon, the mind behind the brilliant HBO series The Wire. A gruff fireplug of a man, balding and big-featured, he speaks with an earthy, almost theatrical bluntness, and his blue-collar crust belies his comfortable suburban upbringing. He’s for all the world the quintessential Hack, down to his ink-stained fingertips—the kind of old newshound who will remind you that a ‘journalist’ is a dead reporter. But Simon takes the cliché one step further; he’s an old newsman who feels betrayed by newspapers themselves.”

CJR: Secrets of the City: “It could be a scene from The Wire, particularly this year. The fifth and final season of David Simon’s dramatic HBO series will focus on the newsroom of a fictional paper called, like the real one, the Sun. The Wire, although fictional, explores an increasingly brutal and coarse society through the prism of Baltimore, where postindustrial capitalism has decimated the working-class wage and sharply divided the haves and have-nots. The city’s bloated bureaucracies sustain the inequality. The absence of a decent public-school education or meaningful political reform leaves an unskilled underclass trapped between a rampant illegal drug economy and a vicious ‘war on drugs.’ In the final season, Simon asks why we aren’t getting the message. Why can’t we achieve meaningful reform? What are we telling ourselves about ourselves? To get at these questions, he wants us to see the city from the perspective of a shrinking newsroom.”

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.”