Bill Moyers Talks Drugs, Crime, Journalism and Democracy with Creator of 'The Wire'

By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal. Posted April 21, 2009.

BILL MOYERS: In this clip from your fourth season, that's what one of the main characters tries to explain to the school superintendent, that what they call the "corner kids" are outside the education system altogether. Take a look.

[...]

HOWARD "BUNNY" COLVIN: You put a textbook in front of these kids, put a problem on a blackboard, or teach them every problem on a statewide test and it won't matter, none of it. 'Cause they're not learning for our world, they're learning for theirs. And they know exactly what it is they're training for, and what it is everyone expects them to be.

SUPERINTENDENT: I expect them to be students.

HOWARD "BUNNY" COLVIN: But it's not about you or us, or the tests or the system, it's what they expect of themselves. I mean, every single one of them know they headed back to the corners. Their brothers and sisters, [deleted], the parents, they came through these same classrooms, didn't they? We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn, where'd they end up? Same damn corners. They're not fools, these kids. They don't know our world, but they know their own. I mean, Jesus, they see right through us.

[...]

DAVID SIMON: They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multi-billion drug trade.

BILL MOYERS: I've done several documentaries over the last 40 years. The first one I did was about the South Bronx, called "The Fire Next Door." And what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: To pacify these people who don't have any economic-

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely. In some ways it's the most destructive form of welfare that we've established, which is the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It's basically like opening up a Beth Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, "And you guys are all steel workers." To just say no? That's our answer to that? You know, the economic model does not work. And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did.

BILL MOYERS: Can fiction tell us something about inequality that journalism can't?

DAVID SIMON: I've wondered about that, because I did a lot of journalism. I did a lot of journalism I thought was pretty good. I was very careful as a reporter. And for me, I was trying to explain, for example, as a reporter, I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn't work. And I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces. And they would go into the ether and be gone. And whatever editorial writer was coming behind me would then write, "Let's get tough on drugs." As if I hadn't said anything. Even my own newspaper. And I would think, "Man, it's just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts." When you somehow tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats. And part of that's the delivery system of television. One of the problems with journalism that I've found that THE WIRE obviously didn't have, because we got to tell the story we wanted to tell, but one of the problems with journalism was, they really-- even the highest ambition of the people at my newspaper, was to bite off a small morsel of the actual problem. Surround one little thing. You know, lead paint poisoning. We're going to do a series of articles about lead paint poisoning and show you how bad lead paint poisoning is. And maybe we'll get a law passed. And we'll write the react to our stories. And then we'll submit it for a prize. And that was the highest ambition of people who were regarded as very good journalists.

BILL MOYERS: Is it because we can't go where the imagination can take us? We are tethered to the facts?

DAVID SIMON: Well, and facts-- one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.

[...]

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.

See more stories tagged with: drugs, journalism, crime, police, war on drugs, bill moyers, reporting, the wire, baltimore, arrests, david simon, dope

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

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