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 is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)