Maryland Business

By: Robbie Whelan

This morning on the radio, I heard the voice of The Wire’s creator/producer and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, testifying before a Senate committee called together by Massachussetts Sen. John Kerry to discuss the future of the newspaper industry. Many of our elected leaders, including Maryland Sen. Benjamin Cardin, found themselves in the odd position of calling for government solutions that would allow newspapers to better scrutinize them, and their activities, a proposition that has ruffled some serious feathers for its glaringly apparent conflict of interest.

Cardin proposed 501c(3) tax protection of newspaper publishers. Other solutions have been batted around. An impressive array of media industry bigwigs have testified, including blog empress Arianna Huffington and James Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News. But I found Simon’s comments, as usual, because he’s a showbiz guy with a good sense of drama, to be the catchiest:

“The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.”

Tellingly, the congressional leaders in the room produced one of the most awkward and nervous-sounding collective laughs I’ve ever heard, in response to this comment.

Simon’s is a thought that occurred to me recently as well, after the recent blood-letting at the Sun’s newsroom. Tribune managers gave the axe to 61 editors, reporters, designers, photographers and others two weeks ago, cutting the newsroom staff to about 140, down from about 500 in the late 1990s. The last great (alleged) local political corruption story broken by the Sun was the indictment of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon. The two journalists on that story, investigative reporter Doug Donovan and City Hall beat reporter John Fritze (who I had the privilege of working alongside until about a year ago) have since left the paper, for The New York Times Digital and USA Today, respectively.  Those were guys who had major contacts who leaked information to them and serious noses for government reporting.

All of this is not to disparage the current stable of political reporters at the Sun, or other local media outlets, who remain today. I know many of them, and they are talented, hard-working reporters. But Simon is right: as you whittle down the ranks of the Fourth Estate watchdogs and gouge out the eyes locked on our elected officials’ every move, it becomes scarier and scarier to think what some of them may be getting away with.

And perhaps the scariest part of all is that the honchos at the remaining newspapers seem to be confirming this. In a recent speech at Johns Hopkins University, Monty Cook, the Sun’s current editor-in-chief and a page designer by trade, said, “The days of six-part series are gone.” Will there ever be another great investigative story in this town? Or is Simon right, and are Baltimoreans and Marylanders in for a rough decade?