Simon takes on Baltimore Sun in ‘The Wire’

updated 7:50 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2008

BALTIMORE - In four previous seasons, “The Wire” chronicled this city’s failing or corrupt institutions — the police department, labor unions, City Hall, public schools — that swallowed even the pure souls within them.

Executive producer and lead writer David Simon’s latest target is arguably his most personal. For its fifth and final season, which begins Jan. 6, “The Wire” ventures into the newsroom of The Sun, Baltimore’s newspaper of record, where Simon worked for 13 years as a police reporter before he took a buyout in 1995.

Unsurprisingly, Simon isn’t pleased with what’s happened since then. “The Wire” shows The Sun struggling to maintain its relevance amid profit-hungry corporate owners, obtuse editors and a drastically reduced reporting staff.

Foreign bureaus close. Veteran reporters who know their terrain are cast aside. And into the void steps journalism’s boogeyman: an ambitious reporter (played to weaselly perfection by Tom McCarthy) who lacks talent or scruples and refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Current Sun reporters and editors don’t dispute that recent buyouts and budget cuts have hurt the paper. But they don’t believe The Sun is any more vulnerable to a Jayson Blair-like fabulist as a result.

The show “no more depicts the real-life newsroom of The Baltimore Sun than ‘Law & Order’ depicts the real-life criminal justice system of New York,” said Timothy A. Franklin, The Sun’s editor.

Said Nina K. Noble, an executive producer of “The Wire”: “I don’t think David is pointing any finger at The Baltimore Sun in particular. I think he’s frustrated with the state of media outlets around the country.”

Simon vs. The Sun
Still, Sun staffers won’t have much trouble finding versions of themselves in “The Wire’s” newsroom, which was recreated on a soundstage because shooting in the real newsroom proved too expensive and logistically difficult. While no current reporters appear on the show, several former ones do, and some plot threads appear to be drawn from Simon’s experiences.

“I think people in the newsroom understand that there’s a personal angle in this upcoming season for David,” Franklin said.

That’s putting it mildly. Simon has had a tempestuous relationship with his former employer that, by many accounts, persists to this day.

He has savaged former Sun editor William K. Marimow on several occasions. Franklin says Simon took him out to lunch when he succeeded Marimow in 2004 and was “very frank” about where he thought The Sun could improve. And he’s known for firing off long, profane missives when the newspaper publishes something that upsets him.

“David just goes crazy over things you wouldn’t think he’d take offense at,” said Jean Marbella, a metro columnist who’s been with The Sun for 20 years. “No one will ever show you these letters, but they end up being legendary.”

Some in the newsroom are amazed that Simon remains peeved over things that happened under Marimow and his predecessor, John Carroll, both of whom came to The Sun from The Philadelphia Inquirer in the early 1990s. Simon told The New Yorker that Carroll and Marimow “were tone-deaf and prize-hungry and more interested in self-aggrandizement than in building lasting quality at the paper.”

While Simon is not doing interviews to promote “The Wire” because of the Hollywood writers’ strike, he told The Associated Press by phone Thursday that his low regard for Carroll and Marimow stems from his contention that they did not take seriously his concerns that a reporter for The Sun was inventing material.

“It’s about journalistic fraud and their unwillingness to deal with it,” Simon said.

In response, Carroll said the reporter in question was disciplined after a story that resulted in a retraction, and that the reporter caused no further problems.

“I happen to think that the mistakes that occurred in the paper when I was there were fewer and less serious than the mistakes made in most of the best papers in the country,” Carroll said. “But we certainly made our share.”

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