Yes, we faceless vocal chords of the blogosphere can huzzah and critique and demean pop culture in all degrees, but those shadowy creators behind the small and silver screens have Google access of their own. And one man is not about to take potshots lying down.
First of all, David Simon is The Man (and in the good way), because this is the guy who not only cooked up HBO’s hypersweet The Wire but keeps it well-written and running. Critics love The Wire like Lucas fans love Jedis, and the vast majority of comment on the show is unabashedly rapturous. Sunday’s season premiere, however, proved somewhat underwhelming, and the quizzical critical press dutifully blogged its official doubt.
Slate‘s David Plotz confessed a little trepidation at this season’s new Baltimore Sun newsroom storyline. Simon is an ex-employee of the Sun, and by all accounts has an ax to grind at the deterioration of the paper’s journalism ethics.
I’ve had two brief conversations with David Simon—he’s a friend of a friend—and my wife has had two long ones. In all four of those exchanges, Simon demonstrated an obsession with the Sun that bordered on monomania. There Hanna and I were, slobbering to him about Omar, and Simon kept changing the subject to stories that his editors had screwed up 19 years ago. I’m praying that his fury at the Sun won’t overwhelm his genius for storytelling.
Like a true gentleman, Simon took a moment to straightforwardly address that concern.
I was a newspaperman from my high school paper until I left the Sun at age 35. It was a delight to me. It informs my work in myriad ways. At some point, it went bad. And the fact is, you’ll not find me speaking openly against the fellows who made it go bad for long after my departure. I held my tongue pretty well despite my low regard for those fellows. But in 2000, five years after I left The Sun, those cats finally made clear that they had dragged The Sun into a journalistic fraud through the same myopia and indifference that later cost [Howell] Raines and Gerald Boyd their careers, except they did so despite private warnings about the reporter who was the problem. Why yes, at that point—which you describe as 19 years ago, though it is in fact, seven—I got angry and vocal and direct.
So, yeah, Mr. Plotz, take that — he is angry, and he’s not veiling it. But he will explain it. Cheers to Simon for not slow-burning in world-hating private; he explains himself. (This is also why I love the internet. Not only because it facilitates such quick, direct, even personal exchanges, but because I, an official, anonymous Nobody, get to be privy to it.)
Even smaller charges caught his attention. When those irreverent culture gossips over at New York‘s Vulture took issue with one absurdly minor detail from the season premiere (when a news editor at the paper informs a reporter writing about a fire that you can’t “evacuate” people from a building), David Simon again stepped up to the plate to defend and clarify himself.
At the Baltimore Sun in my day, I was chastised by the great Jay Spry, rewrite man to the world, for evacuating people in my report of a downtown gas leak. I plead guilty to an anachronism if indeed that is what it now is. However, I would argue that since the evacuation of people can in fact mean giving them enemas, the use of such a phrase should be discouraged by editors, given that the alternate phrase in which a given locale is evacuated is better and unequivocal. When a word has two meanings, find another word.
Huzzah. Take that, you snarks! David Simon, when this season wraps, please take on college admissions, infomerical producers, Apple product pricers, entertainment business job searching and all other industries of scam and scandal. (But do have some mercy. Leave us two-bit bloggers alone.)
–– Sloane
Add: more incidents of Simon’s respondage.
TORO! :: bull by the horns 