Via Alan Sepinwall: This piece from The Wire co-creator David Simon on his efforts to learn more about an underreported police shooting in Baltimore is well worth a read.
Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.
Both a gripping narrative and, ultimately, a righteously angry (and ominous) encapsulation of the consequences of the consolidation of media. Seriously: read it.