David Simon Goes to Washington

I believe “The Wire” was one of the best television series’ ever made, so I was greatly disappointed to learn the substance of David Simon’s recent testimony to the Senate about the future of journalism. Not only did he self-righteously mock citizen journalists and deem bloggers and news aggregators “parasites,” he ended his presentation with the suggestion that Congress relax antitrust rules to allow newspapers to create an industry-wide, subscriber database. Sigh.

I have already expressed my opinion that a newspaper cartel is an utterly inane idea (not to mention illegal, unworkable, and undemocratic) here and here, so I will refrain from reiterating my argument. Nonetheless, I cannot help but point out the irony of having someone who consistently preaches against the greed and abuse of capitalist elites now advocating for the creation of an all-powerful cartel that would, under his theory, own the information it gathers. He spends the bulk of his testimony criticizing newspaper executives for ruining journalism under Wall Street’s influence. So why the logical misstep, the completely irrational jump to supporting an anti-competitive coalition of those same newspaper executives and giving them the collective right control the public’s access to the news? Could he really be blind to the potential abuses such a massive journalistic monopoly would create? Answer: yes.

It gets worse. Simon says bloggers and aggregators contribute little more to public discourse than “repetition, commentary, and froth.” He also says it is “embarrassing” how little citizen journalists know about good journalism. Apparently Simon expects us to believe there is a secret to great reporting. Well, I know better. I got my undergraduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. While Medill gives its students excellent training in writing and editing, the general philosophy at the school is that the best training for a career in journalism is a broad liberal arts education. Our professors taught us that good journalists possess two major qualities: they have an insatiable curiosity about the world and the ability to tell a compelling story.

While good reporting may be hard to find, it is not because people lack some special training or knowledge that separates professional journalists from the froth-producing rest of us. It is because good reporting requires a substantial investment of time and money, and newspaper executives have sacrificed that investment for short-term profits, and online media has failed, thus far, to find a revenue model to support it. Simon acknowledges that journalism should not be dictated by Wall Street, yet he was quick to dismiss the bogeyman that is publicly-funded journalism. (If he really believes a government-supported media cannot produce excellent journalism, perhaps he has never heard of the BBC.)

While I was dismayed by Simon’s smugness, his pessimism, and his blindness to the obvious pitfalls of his anti-competitive proposal, my biggest disappointment was that amid all of his high-minded talk about the importance of journalism to democracy, he demonstrates a remarkable lack of vision. Rather than seeing promise in innovation and the democratizing potential of the Internet, he embraces a wholesale exemption from antitrust laws to save a protectionist vision of journalism where news content is a capitalist commodity produced by an elitist few. Maybe Simon does fit in with Hollywood after all.