David Simon Murders Everything

The Wire's creator recently got the chance to eviscerate his enemies in front of the United States Congress. Not surprisingly, the casualties from Simon's testimony include just about everyone and everything.

The internet:

it leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications, whereupon aggregating websites and bloggers contribute little more than repetition, commentary and froth. Meanwhile, readers acquire news from aggregators and abandon its point of origin, namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.

Capitalism:

Second, Wall Street and free market logic, having been a destructive force in journalism over the last few decades, is now not suddenly the answer.

Citizens:

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

Himself:

Well, so much for new media. But what about old media? Well, anyone listening carefully may have noted that—I’m sorry. Cut that part. Anyone listening carefully may have noted that I was brought out of my reporting position in 1995.

Winning:

They had arrived from somewhere else, and they—if they won a prize or two, they would be moving on to bigger and better opportunities within the chain[...]The self-gratification in my profession does not come, you see, from covering a city and covering it well, from explaining an increasingly complex and interconnected world to citizens, from holding basic institutions accountable. It comes from someone handing you a plaque and taking your picture.

I'm sure that after hearing all of this all present members of Congress packed their bags and killed themselves in despair.