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: So, did this great collapse we have been experiencing since last year confirm the reporting you had done about what happens when an economic system creates two separate realities? One that-

DAVID SIMON: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: -manufactures millionaires by the day. And the other that consigns people-

DAVID SIMON: I am as shocked as anybody that we got as much right as we did. Because the truth is we, as I said, we wrote the first season in the midst of Enron and WorldCom. Those were the institutional motifs that we were graphing into "The Wire." The idea that if you-- there was an institution that is supposed to serve you or that you are supposed to serve. And it's supposed to care for you, and, and be a societal positive-- it will find a way to betray you. That was the story that we were writing.

I couldn't have conceived of something as grandiose as the mortgage bubble. When you finally look at what caused that. And the sheer greed and the stupidity of that pyramid scheme. You know, no. We didn't know it was as corrosive as it was. We didn't know it was rotted out that much. But we knew there was something rotten in the core. And we knew it from what we were looking at, in terms of Baltimore, and how Baltimore addressed itself to its problems.

BILL MOYERS: And over the next five years, the next five seasons, your vision of those kids playing out into this giant Ponzi scheme intersected in the streets, the police-

DAVID SIMON: Right.

BILL MOYERS: -and then politics. And all they what they all have in common, as I see it, is juking the stats. I mean-

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: -politics is supposed to be about solving the situations you describe. But it's constantly creating its own reality, right?

DAVID SIMON: It's about money and it's about advancement. And everything that I've actually seen institutionally, from everything America has offered me a glimpse into. You know, as a reporter I got to see some politics. I wasn't a political reporter per se, but I got to see enough of city politics to absorb it. And Ed Burns taught in the Baltimore City School system and pulled all that through the keyhole for season four. I got to see the war on drugs. I got to see policing, as a concept. And I got to see journalism.

And when it came between explaining complicated and sophisticated systems and trying to say, "This is what's going on and if we change this or do that. Or if we actually implement this policy, we can, you know..." But actually doing the hard work of looking at it systemically, nobody had-- there was no incentive to do it, and nobody did it. And that's true in Baltimore today as when I started as a reporter and I think it's true in America.

BILL MOYERS: I remain indebted to those reporters who go where I can't go. Who talk to people I can't reach. Whether it's in the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. And come back and help me, help my perceptions of the war. I'm still indebted to them. And as you say, you were spit out by the forces that work in the journalistic world. And now journalism is spitting out reporters like teeth.

DAVID SIMON: Left and right. You know, listen, I was not the last. That's true. And it's heartbreaking. And I say this with no schadenfreude just 'cause I got a TV gig. It's heartbreaking what's happening. And I feel that the republic is actually in danger.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

DAVID SIMON: There is not guard now on assessing anything qualitatively. Of pulling back the veil behind what an official will tell you is progress, or is valid, or is legitimate as policy. And-- absent that, no good can come from anything. Because there is an absolutely disincentive to tell the truth.

BILL MOYERS: Nobody's de-juking the stats, right?

DAVID SIMON: Exactly. And ultimately I have the utmost confidence in the ability of any ambitious soul anywhere to take what is not progress and what is not valid and to gloss it up and to say, "We're doing a great job."

BILL MOYERS: I read something you recently told "The Guardian," in London: "Oh, to be a state or local official in America..." without newspapers. "It's got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption."

DAVID SIMON: Well, I was being a little hyperbolic. But-

BILL MOYERS: But it's happening. I mean, it's becoming true.

DAVID SIMON: Yes. It absolutely is, it absolutely is. To find out what's going on in my own city I often find myself at a bar somewhere taking, writing stuff down on a cocktail napkin that a police lieutenant or some school teacher tells me. Because these institutions are no longer being covered by beat reporters who are looking for the systemic. It doesn't exist anymore.

And this is not all the Internet. This was a-- you know, there's a lot of the general tone in journalism right now is that of martyrology. Of-

BILL MOYERS: Being martyrs, right.

DAVID SIMON: Yes, we were doing our job. Making the world safe for democracy. And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us? I would buy that if I wasn't in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet because I took the third buyout from the "Baltimore Sun." I was about reporter number 80 or 90 who left, in 1995. Long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time-- those buyouts happened when the "Baltimore Sun" was earning 37 percent profits.

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.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Rights and Liberties! Sign up now »