'Wire' writer says journalists missed the big story

The ex-journalist writer of HBO's "The Wire" points out with quite a bit of glee (warning: strong language) that nearly all the journalists who were critiquing whether the show's final season accurately depicted a newsroom completely missed the larger, meta-criticism: Its fictional Baltimore newspaper missed every single major story in its city throughout the season. Corrupt mayor/police department. Schools teaching the actual test questions. Politics hampering prosecutions. Drug wars and killings. All of it, he says, goes largely unreported in the fictional paper while the journalists there busy themselves with other matters. And all of it "pretty much happened" in the real Baltimore and didn't much appear in news coverage, he alleges.

He decries the slide into " 'impact' journalism, special projects and Pulitzer sniffing," saying that even before the pressures of the Internet, the paper was losing relevance because of these trends.

And he talks about how difficult, time-consuming and expensive "good, probing journalism" is -- developing sources, pawing through records.

But absent that kind of reporting, we will all soon enough live in cities and towns where politicians and bureaucrats gambol freely without worry.