The bad guys will win

The American newspaper industry is in meltdown and no one is angrier than David Simon, even though he quit the newsroom 13 years ago.

Nowadays he is revered as a television dramatist, creator of The Wire, one of the most acclaimed shows ever, which has just started showing, finally, on British mainstream television. But as he watches the great titles of American print fall like dominoes, he fumes that not only newsprint but journalism itself is heading for extinction, and The Wire illustrates the consequences.

Every week brings dire news: the Rocky Mountain News, once the chronicler of the great Frontier, closes down; the Christian Science Monitor silences its presses to try to survive as a website; the Seattle Post Intelligencer follows it to web only; the Chicago Sun Times closes a printing plant, while its rival the Tribune shutters its Washington bureau, unheard of for a leading newspaper, and heads for bankruptcy along with the Los Angeles Times which it bought in what turns out to have been a fatal fever of 'consolidation' and debt. Small-town newspapers die in droves.

The media, watchdog of democracy, is losing its teeth as politicians run riot

The result, Simon warns, is that the watchdog of democracy is losing its teeth, leaving the politicians and their bagmen to run riot in self-interest and so reduce their cities to the corruption, dysfunction and crime portrayed in The Wire, which is built around local politicians, cops and journalists.
 
What does Simon know about this? Well, he's the real thing, for years a crime-beat reporter on the streets of Baltimore, the city where he set his shows with scripts he describes as so rooted in research that they are "stealing life".

Born in Washington, DC, in 1960, and brought up there, he was inspired to go into journalism by the Washington Post's celebrated investigation into the Watergate scandal. He believed that journalism was "God's work", and joined the Baltimore Sun.

A stocky, pugnacious man with a bull neck, Simon loved working the streets to tilt at the powers and institutions he believed responsible for Baltimore's decline and violent, drug-plagued communities. But the culture of the newsroom transformed as the business side of journalism changed. "I got out of journalism," he says, "when some sons of bitches bought my newspaper and it stopped being fun."
 
Simon blames those 'sons of bitches' for compromising America's once-independent city newspapers with an ethos devoted to big business, corporate buy-outs and the maximising of short-term profits to ease the debts of leveraged buy-outs. They have shown "nothing but contempt for their product", and the pay-back is that they are losing their investments.

He has no faith in the idea that the new media of online newspapers and the 'citizen journalism' of blogging, simply because no one has worked how to make them pay, and therefore there is no money to pay the professional journalist.

"If you think," he told the Guardian last week, "that free is going to produce something that's as much of a cost centre as good journalism - because it costs money to do good journalism - you're out of your mind."

The bad guys, he predicts, will be left to "gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city". That is because "the sad thing about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little". There could be no greater condemnation.

Simon, cultivating a style as gritty as his characters, takes it personally: he claims that the motivation for everything he writes is "revenge". His shows are revenge against those he holds responsible for the suffering and dysfunction of Baltimore, and revenge against the owners and craven editors who pulled the teeth of the watchdog.

A journalist portrayed in The Wire, billed as "a repellant police department toady", is named Marimow. One of the two Baltimore Sun editors he most blames for driving him from the newsroom was Bill Marimow. "I have," says Simon, "spent 10 years trying to get my revenge."

Simon made his name with The Corner, a mini-series docudrama which followed David Chase's groundbreaking The Sopranos onto HBO cable. It focused on a single corner in the black Baltimore ghetto where gangs of drug dealers bought and sold, fought and died. But it is an intimate portrait of a struggling community, rather than just another crime story.

That makes it a precursor of The Wire, which expands the portrait to the whole city, as seen from street level. It played on HBO from 2002 through 2008 and takes the form of a police procedural, but from a rebel point of view in which there are few heroes and no glamour. When HBO persuaded him to add the fifth, final, season he insisted that its theme would be journalism and its failures.

Simon wants his dramas to fill at least part of the gap left by those failures. He is now shooting the pilot for a new series for HBO set in post-Katrina New Orleans. He is focused on the hurricane-lashed but middle-class black community of Treme - pronounced "Trah-may" - which has been a seed-bed for New Orleans' musicians, and he plans to capture an "ornate" culture in a city as dysfunctional as any in America, but which has also produced the jazz which is "one of the most original things America ever invented".

There is a message. Simon is pointing out that the city's faith in its levees to protect it from flood was confounded, just as America's faith in its economy has been dashed. "It's a metaphor," he says, "for where we are in America right now." ·