Making the most out of ‘doing more with less’

WESTERN JOURNALISM is not without a vaingloriously self inflated sense of its own precious ideology of fearless truth getting and its institutional centrality to both the democratic process and the lives of communities.

But bewildered by rapidly falling newspaper sales in Britain and the US and after decades of homogenisation as a result of buy-ups, mergers and no real competition, flabby and complacent groups have neither the experience nor nous to fight the threats they face in the digital age.

Many readers are deserting local and regional newspaper titles failing to give them what they were used to while having little or no idea of how cuts in newsgathering is divesting news organisations of expertise and rootedness in their communities.

For those readers seeking a pitch perfect explanation of the chaotic state of newsgathering in the modern age, I recommend series five of the much heralded US television show The Wire. The series is at once a fiercely moralistic love letter to the city of Baltimore, its main daily The Baltimore Sun as well as being a damning critique of the corruption inherent in its civic institutions and the ineffectiveness of the senior management at the paper to highlight them.

Created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former city cop Ed Burns, The Wire through its whole run has become a standing testament to the assertion of Canadian poet Irving Layton that an idealist is a cynic in the making. The Wire says that Baltimore could be great as could its paper, but that it is the institutions that are holding it back.

Only idealists like Simon and Burns who have a high moral standard in mind can be so moved by disappointment to write The Wire when that standard is not reached.

It is the culmination of a 60 hour story which shows the debilitating social effects of the drug trade in every echelon of life in a rust belt city left bereft by the death of industrialisation and the slower death of the port as a major trading post. Corruption is rife and the state of flux is tearing the city apart, as the dockers’ union chief Frank Sabotka says to an ineffective political lobbyist in series two, “You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

With 50,000 desperate addicts, a city council with woefully insufficient budgets and a police force so stretched to the limit as to be taking a massive slash in the face of a force five hurricane – Baltimore is a city on its knees.

All the institutions are broken, even the institution of journalism is failing to live up to American academic Walter Lippman’s basic assertion that “function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” 

In series five, a serial killer is apparently stalking homeless men while drugs kingpins are flooding the city with crack and heroin sold at more than 100 open air drug markets or corners in the city - and the cops can do nothing about either.

The political institutions (council and police force) are filled with senior representatives more interested in their own careers than making a real difference to communities and crucially are not held to account by the press unable or unwilling to cover politics in any meaningful way.

In a scene very recognisable to those of us to have worked in newsrooms in the last 10 years, senior editorial staff announce job cuts standing on chairs announcing to those assembled that ‘We have to do more with less,’ before putting their arm around old timers with ‘big’ pensions and asking them to do the right thing for share holders and take redundo.

When editorial desk staff say they missed stories due to not having enough reporters on the ground the mantra of ‘more with less’ is also trotted out. Likewise the dead hand of out of town ownership is the spectre which looms over newsrooms – in my case it was Canary Wharf, in The Wire’s Baltimore Sun it is Chicago.

The implication of Series 5 is clear: by cutting the newsroom to the bone, getting rid of talented and experienced staff, by chasing prizes and promoting careerist out of town reporters using it as a stop off point to the New York Times or Washington Post at the expense of committed locals, The Sun not only abdicates its community responsibility but fails to get the big stories of corruption inherent to the institutions of society.

Perhaps paradoxically or indeed quixotically, Simon’s illustration of the Sun’s failings reinforces journalists’ professional belief in our ability to fundamentally play a watchdog role in society. But, to say so would be to fail to see the complex accommodation of both the romantic and pessimistic vision of the profession in this troubled era.

Simon manages to address this paradox in one beautiful scene in episode three when outgoing crime reporter Roger Twigg (played by Bruce Kirkpatrick) and city editor Gus Haynes, (a lead touchtone in the series played by Clark Johnson) are having cocktails to mark the former taking a ‘buy out’ redundancy package.

As they tell stories of how they became journalists due to the reverence they saw in those that read papers in their 1960s childhood, Twigg invokes former Baltimore Sun editor and American journalism legend HL Mencken, Haynes replies ‘Fuck Henry Mencken.’ Simon through Haynes, although flirting with old romantic notions of the profession, is quick to shoot them down at least in part due to the practical realisation that the ideology of a bygone era has little relevance in a compromised post modern present comprised of social, civic, moral and personal breakdown. That said, ultimately one can only read the final series of The Wire as a haunting paean to the former primacy of big city newspapers in the civic life of citizens.

But, Simon doesn’t wait to episode three to make this statement, he goes on the attack from the first scenes of the Baltimore Sun in episode one. As Haynes, a former crime reporter turned desk man, comes back from a smoke in the van bay he notices two editorial staff in the conference room watching a fire in West Baltimore.

He asks if either have called Twigg and neither have. His reply, “Who watches a fire? There’s some shameful shit going on round here,” gets to the heart of the meta-narrative: corporate journalism is watching as itself and the communities it is supposed to serve are burning and dying.

Simon admitted at a talk with USC students in 2008 that it is a simplistic visual metaphor but he couldn’t help himself. Perhaps the simplest of messages have the most power and by the end of The Wire we are left in no doubt about the complicity of the institution of journalism in the degradation of civil society by its own institutions.

In addition to journalism’s failings, both The Wire and Simon and Burns’ subsequent Iraq War HBO mini series, ‘Generation Kill’, provide another key narrative point: that the ruthless ambition of stupid people leads to horrific consequences. In The Wire, Scott Templeton, an ambitious mid-Westerner using the Sun as a step-up to the Washington Post concocts a story. Tommy Carcetti, the mayoral candidate played by Irish actor Aiden Gillen, puts his own career in front of social responsibility, while the police and drug gangs are riddled with similar chancers.  In ‘Generation Kill’ idiotic officers in positions of power in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the United States Marine Corps cause untold damage on their own troops and the people of Iraq that they profess to be liberating.

From a journalistic point of view, The Wire chimed with me because at the same time something similar was happening on the newspapers I last worked on.

Older staff, with great contacts books were being let go while lower paid graduate trainees with no loyalty to the paper were being promoted. Subs desk men and women who taught me how to maintain the spelling, stylistic and ethical standards of the paper were leaving for poorer newspapers, becoming PRs or taking redundancy. The production desk and subs were seen as the lowest rung of the journalism ladder, in The Wire the copy desk is the last refuge of those who won’t take the buy out or are demoted because of sub-ordination.

The days of revering expertise are gone because it costs too much. As Twigg says, it costs a whole lot less to put out a poor newspaper which no-one reads than trying to get a quality product out. Again the refrain comes from executive editor Thomas Klebanow (played by David Costabile of ‘Flight of the Conchords’ fame) ‘the news hole is shrinking thanks to the internet and we have to do more with fewer staff.’

Ironically, by commanding remaining staff to fill more pages with bogus investigations or lifestyle nonsense, we have never said less journalistically in the history of our industry and as Simon points out, we miss the great, vital narratives of our times. At a regional level in British journalism we have now, apparently, finished with investigative reporting altogether, believing erroneously in the bullshit assertions of new media academics that the blogosphere and citizen journalism will universally fill that void.

Through job cuts and redundancies we are literally rendering ourselves impotent journalistically while patting ourselves on the back for saving shareholders overheads. Journalists were even urged to buy shares in the groups they worked for, intrinsically implicating themselves in the crime of falling wages and newsroom deforestation.  Emperor Nero is the obvious, clichéd parallel and I’m not good enough to ignore it.

As a result, communities we served are ignored largely because we have no-one of experience to get out and speak to them as it costs too much, nor have we invested in training these communities to provide content for the potentially powerful digital platforms more than a century’s worth of market leadership should provide.

In The Wire, the heartbreaking but ultimately redemptive story of Bubbles the drug addict (wonderfully played by Andre Royo) is almost accidentally covered by the Baltimore Sun, while the entirely fictive narrative concocted by Templeton gets him and his bosses a ‘proud’ but ultimately empty journalism prize.

If The Wire’s series five tells us anything, it is that the historic role of the regional newspaper as a watchdog on corruption and crime, civically, is dead. It also shows us that management, hidebound by delivering cuts to satisfy share holders in clunky and anachronistic corporations are, at best, unable to avert this catastrophe. Perhaps more pertinently, at worst, they are shown to be unwilling to do so thanks largely to self interest.

Simon and Burns have created the ultimate dramatic expression of civic breakdown in the age of late capitalism and institutional implosion. The Wire, harking back to the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides, says more about the modern city state and modern journalism than our newspapers and broadcast organisations ever do. The shame of that should be ours and we should revere them for creating the greatest dramatic work of our age.