General

The Wire creator on why newspapers matter

A former cop reporter, he goes back on the beat and finds he’s alone

Newspapers are going the way of the dodo. Last week it was the Rocky Mountain News, next week it may well be the San Francisco Chronicle, leaving a major American city bereft of a daily. The mourning voices are often fewer and less articulate than you might expect, so in awe of the swift change are those best placed to lay out why papers matter. But David Simon, the creator of HBO’s critically acclaimed police drama The Wire, today explains why everyone (and not just print journalists) should care. A former cop reporter at the Baltimore Sun, Simon’s sense of outrage recently got him out on the beat again, where he discovered first hand what a city becomes without the watchdog press. “Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information.”

The Washington Post

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