4th Exclusive David Simon Q&A (page 3)
Q: What possessed you to argue with the the newspapers, magazines, and bloggers in their house? You know they
have more ink (bandwidth). [Jim]A: Of course they do. That's why we had Judge Phelan say as much in the middle of the run -- about the time when we figured the wailing would peak. Write about the drug war, the failure of the inner-city schools, the lack of political reform and the death of the working class and you can't get off the entertainment pages. Write about journalism, and you are a provocation to democracy itself and journalists themselves get as excited as alley cats with their tails afire. But there's fun in that, too. We saw it coming and were willing to play.
In your question, though, I'm not sure you've characterized my interactions with any more precision than the journalists and bloggers themselves.
You'll be hard-pressed to find me challenging any critique of the show itself or arguing with a critic about the merits of the show. I'm pretty rigorous about letting that stuff go without comment. If someone asks me a specific question, I answer it. But I don't dive in to defend the show.
I wrote pieces for Esquire and The Washington Post -- not about The Wire but about journalism. I used to write prose a bit. I still do it now and then, and when I have an idea about how to say something about an issue, I'm inclined to try, understanding that to have an opinion on anything is to provoke debate and counter-opinion. Got no problem with that. And the Baltimore Magazine piece was really just a considered thank you to Baltimore -- and a tweak of Mr. O'Malley as a bonus.
The only substantive interaction I've had on the Internet is to complain to one of those fellas on Slate when he cannibalized my dinner conversation with him at a private event. Anything I said to him, he could have confirmed easily in an on-the-record interview, yet he chose instead to do something that I found ethically inappropriate. My standard for journalism is that when I am working, people know I am working. And I was upset that it wasn't his standard as well. If you go back and read my remarks, you'll see that this is the whole of my response; their take on The Wire is their take and the work will either stand criticism or it won't. The fellow apologized privately for the lapse and that, for me, ended it, though I noticed that his compadre promptly defended him, even in the wake of that apology, as having done nothing wrong. Apparently, the standards for journalism are different on the Internet, or different from what they used to be in general. In any event, I wrote two long books of narrative about real lives and none of the dozens of people named and depicted in that work were ever unaware that a working reporter was present. I believe in that standard, even if others no longer do.
Other interactions? Mostly, I poke in here and there to explain a misunderstood phrase or something technical, or that we asked Richard Price to homage a scene from his book, or to compliment the seriousness of the discussion. The New York Magazine people actually called Diego Aldana at HBO to request a comment to a specific item about the definition of "evacuate." I texted a response to Diego and he forwarded it and incredibly, the gents at their website wrote it up as if I responded on my own and not to their specific request. And so it goes. But you'll be hard pressed to find a single instance of me getting in the way of criticism or discussion, save for Slate's notable misuse of a private encounter with me at a private event.
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