What do TV writer-producers do when their show gets canceled?
If you're The Wire creator David Simon, you can always fall back on your old crime reporting role. The former journalist tells in this Washington Post articlehow whitewashed coverage of a Baltimore police shooting created a situation where "one old police reporter lost his mind and began making calls."
As fans of The Wire know, Simon can spin a story, and he does that here -- with his usual deliberate (aka leisurely) speed -- while analyzing the fallout after "print journalism spent the 1980s and '90s taking profits and then, in the decade that followed, impaling itself on the Internet."
"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."
His HBO show may be over, but Simon is still crusading.