Tuesday, March 03, 2009

David Simon for President

My favorite white man in the world, David Simon (creator of The Wire and a ton of other classic groundbreaking television shows) decided that people didn't pay enough attention to Season 5 of The Wire and went back into reporting.

Or maybe he smelled bullshit on a police shooting and decided to embarrass at least three institutions at the same time.

Read the Washington Post article here.

It's pretty incredible.

(Did I mention that I also took a train with DS (as I call him) from Columbia University to Penn Station? 
Yea, I'm cool like that.)

He touches on so many of themes (bloated police bureaucracy, community/police disconnect, failure of the media) that made The Wire so powerful and vital.

Clearly the media is at fault here. I'm far from an expert on this but the most immediate problem is that the profit margin expectations are too high on newspapers.

They need to be privatized by angel investors who can accept a 2% return or just be happy with breaking even.
This is a much better approach than constant staff cuts to reduce costs to increase profits and pump the stock price.

Otherwise these important and even the not so seemingly important stories will continue to slip through the cracks. At least we have TMZ to do our serious reporting.

Joking... I think.

http://www.tmz.com/2009/03/01/tmz-story-forces-bank-to-return-1-6-billion/

5 comments:

  1. See, I love David Simon, but he needs to stick to the shit he knows about. Everything he says about newspapers cutting reporting staff and all that is right on the money, but whenever he starts talking about the internet he sounds like an old fool that has no idea what the fuck he's talking about. Like Grandpa Simpson or something, waving his cane at those darn interwebs kids.

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  2. Yea, he sounds ignorant when discussing the Internet. Free content subsidized by advertising clearly works for many organizations.

    Um, try Google and Yahoo for starters.
    I ignored that foolishness of his because everything else in the story was pretty worthwhile.

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  3. He's been on the cops here for a while and he deserves it.

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  4. BTW shot you a request...haven't gotten SF yet though.

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  5. Only page 2 is displayed. If you click on page 1, it asks for a person to sign in or register for an account. Is there any way that the full article can be posted?

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