* — David Simon is the executive producer and writer of the HBO series Treme. He worked as a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun from 1983 to 1995. After leaving the newspaper, Simon created the award-winning series The Wire and the miniseries Generation Kill. A version of this essay first appeared on his website (www.davidsimon. com) under the title “Dirt Under the Rug.”
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Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > july 10 > 2012
want to know how many cases that desperate fellow is quietly sweeping under the rug. It went downhill from there. My guess is if I was half as honest as I needed to be, I won’t be invited back to address that esteemed group further. And my guess is that this blog item*, unless it gets picked up and reframed by mainstream media — by institutions large enough and central enough to civic life to cause a state’s attorney or police commissioner some real grief — won’t matter either. The problem, of course, is that I’m not institutional. I’m an ex-police reporter who still talks to people. And, every now and then, a law club asks for some remarks or I get the inclination to write a blog item on something that happened months or even a year earlier. In this instance, that leaves me in a position to parse some statistical bullshit. But it’s certainly half-assed and indirect. It’s not what a healthy institutional press is capable of achieving. Not even close. And for all of us, the stakes are profound. It’s hard enough to hold agencies and political leadership accountable in a culture that no longer has the patience or inclination to engage with the actual dynamics of actual institutions. At this point, we are having trouble as a society recognizing our problems, much less solving any of them. But absent a properly funded professional press — one that covers the civic bureaucracies with constancy and tenacity, we’re going to have even less of a shot going forward. Again, this particular policy change that has done such damage to the investigative deterrent in Baltimore occurred almost a year ago. The Baltimore Sun was able to report at points on the complaints of detectives against the new policy, some of whom have been frustrated getting cases charged. But the net effect — the fact that the number of murder defendants had been halved by the new policy went unaddressed. And the implications of all this — as detailed above — haven’t been fully reported. Again, The Sun still has some hard-working, committed folk, but they are younger and fewer, and they are spread thin across a civic firmament that is, if anything, even more complicated, more self-protecting, and more entrenched. As for the blogosphere, it just isn’t a factor for this kind of reporting. Most of those who argue that new-media journalism is growing, exploding even, in a democratic burst of egalitarian, from-all-points-onthe-compass reportage are simply never talking about beat reporting of a kind that includes qualitative judgment and analysis. There’s more raw information, sure. And more commentary. And there are, for what it’s worth, more fledgling sites to look for that kind of halfway-there stuff. Usually, such sites are what folks point at and laud when they argue that the bulldozing of mainstream media can proceed without worry. At one point last week, I noted a comment on a journalism website in which a new-media advocate pointed out that local websites were perfectly capable of printing the details of every murder as they occurred — as if such a feat undertaken by so-called citizen journalism isn’t mere accounting, but something on the level of real reportage. Beat reporting — and the beat structure of a metropolitan daily — is what is dying here. Absent a fresh online revenue stream, newspapers can no longer sustain veteran reporters on institutional beats the way they once did; not in the numbers necessary to keep bureaucracies honest. And the blogosphere? Good luck. The day that a citizen journalist can summon the sources, patience, clarity and tenacity to uncover such backroom machinations, to sort and filter the implications and then land a careful critique of the dynamic — well, that will be the day that he or she has spent two or three or four years covering that institution or agency. In this case, that means two or three years of drinking beer in cop bars and taking prosecutors to lunch and saving home numbers of whichever disgruntled police commanders are willing to talk about the dirt. And the day such a citizen journalist devotes that much time to such a crusade, I’m willing to bet it’s because someone is paying them an honest wage to go to work every day. Which makes that person not a citizen journalist at all, but a professional reporter; which brings us more or less right back to the world that the Internet supposedly vanquished.
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