I've been watching the fifth season of The Wire. This views Baltimore through the lens of the Baltimore Sun, which is going through a difficult period of newsroom cutbacks due to the collapse of the business case of print newspapers. The vision of Baltimore of David Simon, the creator of the Wire was shaped by his work as a crime reporter.

There is a good review of The Wire by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic. It is structured around David Simon, was written before the fifth season went to air. This season deals with how Simon addresses the decline in journalism marked by racism. It doesn't pay attention to the problems happening in the city. There is no quality journalism anymore.

Simon has created a ‘junkyard landscape’ of deindustrialised and deproletarianised US black ‘inner cities’, whose ‘districts of dereliction’ are plagued by drugs, violence, and poverty.

In this "interview in Slate Simon says that The Wire is about?

Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism...hether you're a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It's the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It's viable for the few. But I don't live in Westwood, L.A., or on the Upper West Side of New York. I live in Baltimore.