Popular Culture
A fictional depiction of The Sun and its staff members was featured in season 5 of the HBO series The Wire, which is set in Baltimore and created by former Sun reporter David Simon.
Like all of the institutions featured in The Wire, the fictional version of The Sun was portrayed as having many deeply dysfunctional qualities while also having very dedicated people on its staff. The season focused on the role of the media in impacting political decisions in City Hall, which in turn affected the priorities of the Baltimore Police Department. Additionally, the show explored the business pressures of modern media through layoffs occurring at the fictional Sun, which were ordered by the Tribune Company, the corporate owner of The Sun.
One storyline involved a troubled Sun reporter named Scott Templeton with an escalating tendency of sensationalizing and falsifying stories. The Wire portrayed the managing editors of The Sun as turning a blind eye to the protests of a concerned line editor in the search for a Pulitzer Prize. The show insinuated that the motivation for this institutional dysfunction was the business pressures of modern media, and working for a flagship newspaper in a major media market like The New York Times or The Washington Post was portrayed as being the only way to avoid the cutbacks occurring at The Sun.
Season 5 was The Wire's last. The last episode, -30-, featured a montage at the end portraying the ultimate fate of the major characters. It showed Scott Templeton at Columbia University with the senior editors of the fictional Sun accepting the Pulitzer Prize, with no mention being made as to the aftermath of Templeton's career.
Read more about this topic: The Baltimore Sun
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The highest end of government is the culture of men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)