In case you needed another reason to watch the final season of The Wire.
Yes, the last season. The last theme is basically asking the question, why aren’t we paying attention? If we got everything right in the last four seasons in depicting this city-state, how is it that these problems—which have been attendant problems regardless of who is in power—how is it that they endure? That brings into mind one last institution, which is the media. What are we paying attention to? What are we telling ourselves about ourselves? A lot of people think that we’re going to impale journalists. No. It’s not quite that. What stories do we want to hear? How closely do they relate to truth; how distant are they from the truth? We have a story idea about media and consumers of media. What stories get told and what don’t and why it is that things stay the same.
