The Undisturbed Vision

One way or another, most of the criticism of The Wire's fifth season has boiled down to the show stepping onto journalists' home turf.  Some of the criticisms are valid; some are honest oversights as journalists forget the show has always been exploring somebody's work culture; and some oversights are more calculated and more personal. For an example of the last type, look no further than Mark Bowden's article in The Atlantic.

Bowden opens his piece with enough praise for The Wire that his criticisms initially seem motivated by a reasonable concern for the show's quality.  They run for several paragraphs before he discloses that he's friends with William Marimow and John Carroll, a pair of former Baltimore Sun editors who have a long-running feud with David Simon who inspired this season's Klebanow and Whiting.  Before he gets around to mentioning his rooting interest, however, Bowden speculates that Simon's political views have overwhelmed his commitment to the truth:

This bleakness is Simon’s stamp on the show, and it suggests that his political passions ultimately trump his commitment to accuracy or evenhandedness.

[...]

But the more passionate your convictions, the harder it is to resist tampering with the contradictions and stubborn messiness of real life.  Just when you think you have the thing figured out, you learn something that shatters your carefully wrought vision. Being surprised is the essence of good reporting. But it’s also the moment when a dishonest writer is tempted to fudge, for the sake of commercial success—and a more honest writer like Simon, whose passion is political and personal, is tempted to shift his energies to fiction.

Which is precisely what he’s done. Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out.  He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

Bowden doesn't exactly say that Simon has fudged the facts; that would require substantiation, which he doesn't provide.  He just equates writing fiction with muddling the truth and claims, with no evidence offered, that Simon has left out anything that doesn't fit his vision.  As season five has devoted more attention to the dire consequences of fabrication, and as it has vilified the quote-juicing Scott Templeton, Bowden's insinuations about accuracy and honesty begin to look more and more appalling--like vicious but indirect attacks on Simon's integrity.

Bowden says fiction "frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair."  Like his earlier comment about "evenhandedness," that says less about David Simon and The Wire than it does about the modern media's obsession with a toothless and illusory "objectivity" that presumes there are always two (and usually only two) equally valid sides to every story.  Mark Bowden, for example, apparently believed that he could "characterize" the dispute between Simon and Marimow and Carroll "without entering it," even though he admits that Marimow and Carroll are his friends and Marimow was a longtime colleague.  (Then again, Mark Bowden also believes there's a valid case for torture.)

Curiously, while various journalists have rushed to defend Marimow and Carroll, none of them have named The Wire's third Baltimore Sun target, reporter Jim Haner.  (A couple of fabricated events and quotes, along with accusations by Simon and others that Haner invented these details "to jazz up his stories and his status," apparently inspired the Templeton plot.)  Bowden only refers to Haner as "a widely respected Sun reporter, protected by Carroll and Marimow."  Perhaps Bowden and the Sun's other defenders don't want to sully Haner's reputation any further, but it strikes me as perverse that Bowden would compare Simon's markedly fictional narrative with "tampering" and fudging the truth while concealing the name of a reporter who's accused of fabricating quotes and facts in his newspaper articles--not to mention defending the editors who protected that reporter.

In short, the more I learn about Simon's feuds with the Sun and the more season five addresses the corrosive effects of dishonesty in the media, the more Bowden's comments read like the ultimate in hypocrisy.  For a legitimately evenhanded take on the Simon-Marimow & Carroll feud, I recommend this Columbia Journalism Review piece.  Lawrence Lanahan reports on some of the same events Bowden describes--and includes key information Bowden omits, like Simon's kind words for Carroll and Marimow's recent troubles, his realization of "his own smallness and pettiness," and his determination to take season five beyond his old grudges.

What was that about the undisturbed vision?  Thank God journalists like Mark Bowden are around to give us the fair and balanced truth those shady writers of fiction evade.

My colleague Bart Beaty, in an e-mail correspondence after the first episode aired, had this response to Bowden's article:

I suppose it will be a long and grueling campaign, waged by the Sun and its compatriots, to suggest that all is right in the world of journalism. When The Wire stuck to criticizing those things that journalists wished they had the balls to criticize (civic corruption, union corruption, the schools, the courts, the police, unfettered free market capitalism) all was right with the world. When the show demonstrates how complicit they are in the problem, let the howls of outrage be unleashed.

Last night's was a great episode and Simon masterfully laid the same foundation for criticism that he has in other seasons. Look how quickly the problems with journalism were enumerated: The reporters, one played by his own wife!, who watch the fire rather than investigate it; the editor who spikes a story for a crony; the careerist young man who sees nowhere to go in this small town. These features - cronyism, apathy, careerism - are exactly the traits that the show has relentlessly documented in other areas (the cops, the politicians, the unions, the teachers, the dealers) and for which it is praised. By heaven forfend that he suggest that the system extends to the watchmen themselves. Heaven forfend that it extend to "notable newspapermen who are my friends".

Anyway, a logically convoluted piece by someone who has trouble distinguishing fiction from reality. Not surprising from the torture-advocating chronicler of American manliness, Mark Bowden, the "thinking man's" Tom Clancy.

I couldn't have said it better myself, unless I replaced "by heaven forfend" with something from this century.  Or the last one.  But otherwise, Bart cuts to the heart of the recent journalistic outrage.  The Wire is making largely the same criticisms it's made of the police, drug dealers, unions, politicians, and teachers--but it's not supposed to be making them about journalists.

(Thanks to Bart for allowing me to publish his e-mail, and for steering me towards the Bowden and CJR articles.)

Comments

[Anothertake]

http://www.esquire.com/features/essay/david-simon-0308

It gets better actually. Bowden was not only hired by Marimow a couple years ago as a columnist at the Inquirer, he blurbed Haner's book, Soccerhead.

There is more here than some wanted to meet the eye. The Atlantic
piece crosses some remarkable ethical thresholds.

[Marc]

No doubt. Thanks for the additional information.

And thanks for the Esquire link. A slight change of topic, but I always got the impression that Simon was sort of the McNulty of the Sun. Makes this season all the more interesting...

[Ken Lowery]

If I'm reading Bowden right, he's basically criticizing Simon for not telling stories the way he does. He doesn't seem to grasp that they are two different people going for two different things in two different ways; Bowden constructs a narrative from journalism, where Simon uses uncanny verisimilitude to tell stories about that old chestnut, the Human Condition. Of course Simon's methods will be seen as inadequate, viewed through Bowden's lens. But it ain't Simon's fault Bowden doesn't know how to "read" the show.

The adage I live by when taking in fiction, or allegory, or what have you, is that something does not have to be factual to be true. Among other things, this allows me to be a religious person without believing in the supernatural or any kind of afterlife. But I guess the ability to make that distinction, and to find value in fictionalized accounts, is what makes me a critic... and Bowden not one.

[Ken Lowery]

Oh yeah, the third thing...

I think we're all (you, me, Bowden) not giving the rest of the creative crew of The Wire enough credit when we lay it all at the feet of David Simon. I've no doubt he's the ringmaster, but every interview and story I've read about that show's creative process suggests everyone else's fingerprints are all over it, too. And that these are people who know their shit.

[Marc]

Yeah, Bowden's criticizing Simon for writing fiction instead of handwringing on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, I'll-just-sit-back-and-observe-with-forced-neutrality-even-though-I'm-friends-with-half-the-people-involved journalism. A coherent vision is an asset in fiction, or in scholarship for that matter--in any form where you're allowed, in fact encouraged, to make arguments instead of pretending to a pure and unsullied objectivity.

The notion that Simon and co. have left out things that don't fit their beliefs is absurd. From the failures of Hamsterdam to the occasionally idealistic politicians, The Wire throws in plenty of details that would seem to cut against its vision. This show doesn't cut details, it adds them to build realistic characters and a realistic city; the sheer crush of details almost always complicates the simple moralization Bowden projects onto Simon.

I could see making Bowden's claim about season five's newspaper plot, but not about Simon or the show or, um, the art of fiction as a whole. But then, I don't think Bowden has really failed to read The Wire. He's a bright guy and his article shows a deep familiarity with the show. He's casting aspersions on Simon's integrity and panning the art of fiction because The Wire is criticizing his buddies and his old boss, calling them out not just on the ways they have failed his vision of journalism but on the ways their vision is itself a failure.

[Anothertake]

Art is the lie that makes us see the truth.

-- Picasso

[Ken Lowery]

"instead of handwringing on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand,"

Was that an Al Swearengen moment? That was beautiful.

[Marc]

You know, I wasn't a Deadwood fan. I tried watching the show a couple of times and found I was bored by any scene that didn't have Ian McShane.

To be fair, I came in late and was probably missing a lot of context. But no, no deliberate Swearengen moments.

[Marc]

Also, what kind of Al Swearengen moment wouldn't culminate in calling Mark Bowden a cocksucker?

[Ken Lowery]

I asked because he has this great scene where he asks the delegate from the county seat what kind of bribes they'll have to pay to get their land titles recognized. And he cuts him off with a, "And don't give me this, 'on the one hand, and on the other hand'" shit.

I'm inclined to think of Deadwood and The Wire as birds of a feather. But you pretty much need to be there from the beginning.

[Marc]

Ah, no, if I got it from anywhere it was from a James Wood column about critics. Or maybe a critic's column about James Wood?