David Simon on cutting "The Wire"

How hard was it to choose which kid would be saved, as Namond was by Colvin? It seemed like Randy was going to be the one who made it out.

The writers argued it out. That's the other thing, "The Wire" is not David Simon. I'm getting a lot of ink, but Ed Burns has a huge amount to do with this, and the other writers -- George Pelecanos and Richard Price and Dennis Lehane and Bill Zorzi. I mean it really is a team effort. And the stuff gets better when we sit around and argue with each other. We've been doing that for five years. We tried it in all variations, and we ended up where we ended up.

There's been some criticism of your depiction of the Baltimore Sun, with some claiming that you were too close to the material or had an ax to grind; one writer at Slate described a conversation he had with you about your feelings toward the Sun at a party. What has your reaction been?

At the beginning of the run I was very careful about not responding to any critiques of the actual show. We knew that we were going to take it on the chin from certain quarters in journalism, and we were fine with that. I mean, I put that line in the judge's mouth right in the middle of the run: "Never piss off people who buy ink by the barrelful." It's an old saw in journalism; you've heard it a million times. But I gave it to the judge at that moment because I thought, this is about the place in the run where the journalistic tantrum is going to sound like an alley full of cats. So it's all with a wink and nod and knowing that it's coming.

The fellow on Slate ... I went to a wedding with him, and we sat around at a table -- there was nobody but journalists at the table. We all talked about journalism, and I was asked a bunch of questions about what it was like to transition out of newspapers and why I thought I should do that and how it happened ... ultimately, I did write him privately and say, you know, I was a reporter for many years quoting dozens and dozens of people by name, some of them about very intimate moments in their lives, and not one of them ever didn't know that I was a working reporter. If you wanted to talk to me about [former Sun editor and managing editor] John Carroll or Bill Marimow or the Baltimore Sun or journalism or anything, all you do is pick up the phone. I'd take your call. I'm certainly not bashful about answering your questions. Why did you need to cannibalize my private life? Because if that's the case, I'm not coming to the wedding and I'm not coming to the party anymore. [Editor's note: Simon responded to the Slate piece here. Slate's David Plotz apologized here.]

How do you feel about being painted as this bitter person?

When all they've got is the ad hominem, then that's all they've got. I'll tell you a little something about [Mark Bowden, the author of the Atlantic's piece on Simon, "The Angriest Man in Television"]. He sent me an unedited version of his story and asked for comment. And my comment to him was, Listen, Mark, I don't care what you say about the show. I don't even care about you calling me angry ... But I do resent you basically declaring -- as he did in the piece that he sent me -- that by criticizing these guys [Carroll and Marimow] for tolerating a fabricator and defending a fabricator long after he'd been caught repeatedly, I have slandered two honorable worthies. You acknowledge that they've been your career-long friends in journalism ... this is really about your loyalty to old friendships.

And so, I then asked him, Given that Bill Marimow has recently hired you for a job, to be a columnist for the [Philadelphia] Inquirer, do you think there's an ethical problem here? And he didn't answer, and in a separate snail-mail letter, I posed the question to [Atlantic editor James Bennet]. I said, I don't care what you write about the show, but the only guy who's being slandered here is me. I never slandered or libeled anybody in hundreds of bylines and a couple of books, and now I'm going to come up to two editors and just claim they did something that they didn't do?

And he responded by saying, Well, I have complete faith in Mark Bowden. And then Bowden, upon finding out that I dared to pose this question to his editor, he took the fact that my response to him was off the record and decided to characterize it [in his Atlantic essay]. Have you ever heard that you can take somebody off the record if they ask your editor an ethical question? I've never heard that.

Listen, I hold those fellows [Carroll and Marimow] in low regard, I hold what they value in journalism in low regard, and they the same for me. I left the paper in '95 -- I said nothing, I never invoked their names publicly in five years. There was a fellow who was making it up, he had two stories retracted in total, and there were a lot of people in the newsroom who knew that he was cooking it. A very good reporter [at the Sun] went to talk to Marimow [about it] and nothing ever happened. It was the same dynamic that happens at every paper when people start complaining about a problem -- same thing that happens to the [New York] Times people when they complained about [Rick] Bragg and [Jayson] Blair, same thing that happened at USA Today when they started worrying about Jack Kelley's copy.

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