4th Exclusive David Simon Q&A (page 4)
Q: Were you surprised that journalists missed the point of the newspaper storyline? By being outraged, did they marginalize themselves without even realizing it? [Glen]
A: Well, yeah, since you're asking. They're arguing over whether Gus Haynes is more saintly than Colvin or whether Whiting is more venal than Valchek, or whether Templeton could win a Pulitzer, or even more forest-and-trees stuff like why aren't the reporters blogging more or reading the Internet or...
Meanwhile, the newspaper's product is almost wholly divorced from the city and its problems that we, the viewers, have seen depicted. They miss Carcetti cooking the stats. They miss the lie in the 3rd-grade test scores. They miss the political machinations that undo investigations and prosecutions. They miss violent drug wars and the murder of the biggest drug dealer in the city and so forth. And in the real Baltimore? Guess what stories are actually rooted in reality and what stories did not receive meaningful coverage in the local media.
That was the theme. And well, they missed that, too -- even a lot of the journalists who were not at all critical of the show missed it. Pretty meta, huh? Or maybe we didn't do a good enough job getting our story arc across. Dunno. Maybe Gus Haynes should have said to Alma at some point in episode 10: "I worry that we're missing a lot of stories that we don't even know about anymore because we're so fucking thin." Or would that have been unsubtle? Ah well...onward, I say...
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