One of the key scenes in tonight's episode of The Wire was a dramatization of something that's been happening in print newsrooms across the nation for the last several years: the management of the show's fictionalized Baltimore Sun, embodied by the publisher and the editor, call everybody in the newsroom together and announce that the paper's foreign bureaus are being shut down, and that they are making cutbacks in the paper's Baltimore staff as well, mainly through buyouts. Veteran reporters especially are vulnerable, as they are easily replaced with younger, cheaper workers.
And then, as if to underscore just how thrillingly immediate The Wire can be, there's this story, from tomorrow's New York Times, about the editor of the Los Angeles Times being forced out today (Sunday) because he refuses to make more cuts in the news staff. The accompanying photo looks like a still from tonight's episode of The Wire—the same long, wide, low-ceilinged, overlit room, the same balding personnel, all staring at the guy standing a little higher than them and contemplating their futures as he gives them the bad news.
And further entangling this Gordian knot of art and life, all twisted together on the same day, is the fact that the NY Times story about the LA Times references James Carroll, who is a) another former editor of the LA Times who quit rather than make more cuts, and b) the model for one the corporate hatchet men at Simon's fictional Baltimore Sun, according to Mark Bowden's Atlantic article.
Holy metanarrative, Batman (and yeah, there was a Batman reference in tonight's Wire, too). I'm afraid I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find out that Tommy Carcetti really is the mayor of Baltimore.
RSS Feed