Last night I stumbled across HBO's half-hour promo for season 5 of The Wire. Previous seasons have addressed the police, local politics, unions and schools. This season is supposed to take a characteristically blunt look at the media. The preview was, uh, surprising — for a couple of reasons:

• Joe Klein is featured as the voice of downtrodden journalism! For some reason he was selected to express the concerns of the in-the-trenches, unheralded-hero reporter. My journalist friends assure me that this was an especially inspired choice for representing those who are asked to "do more with less" (after all, he apparently makes do without fact checkers).
• David Simon does not care for the internet. Yeah, superficial attention was paid to the increasingly hard-headed, businesslike approach of the news industry. But that complaint's well-worn and was consequently skimmed over. Mostly, the writers and talking heads from the Baltimore Sun seemed eager to complain about newspapers' willingness to give their content away on the web. That they consider this a strategic mistake rather than an inevitable capitulation demonstrates an understanding of the world that's uncharacteristically shallow for something associated with this franchise.

Of course, it'd be dumb to write off the coming season on the basis of a promotional special. David Simon's political philosophy seems to run more along the lines of "everything's fucked, all the time" than toward simple scapegoating. So perhaps the carping crammed into that thirty minutes was simplistic by necessity.

But the promo was still discouraging. I worry that Simon's writerly pretensions might make him unduly lionize the big city newsroom, an environment that seems like a lot of fun for entitled smartasses who self-describe as "scrappy", but which increasingly seems like a 20th century quirk that's no longer economically sustainable. I admit I'm as likely to bitchily lament the loss of a free ride as anyone — but then I'm not a journalist, and I haven't got a TV show to run. Those who do saw fit to include in this promotional program the Sun's television critic, who cites the paper's employment of only one such TV critic as evidence of newsprint's decline. To this, one can only say FUCK YOU: the internet has made it very, very clear that having opinions about TV is not something for which people need to be compensated. The amount of self-awareness on display in the promo show was less than inspiring.

So I confess I'm a little worried. Simon's provided cutting, complex critiques of police, politicians and schools. And admittedly, he's done this despite his co-creator Ed Burns having a personal stake in two of those three systems. But I wonder if Simon will be able to confront these simple facts: that business models based on the difficulty of distributing information are no longer viable; and that the media's vulnerability to competition from amateur blogospheric efforts is, rather than an unfortunate cosmic injustice, almost entirely the result of the industry's failure to implement a proper meritocracy. The fifth season promo's inkstained hagiography was not encouraging on this score.

The Wire's different and great because it seems more honest than anything else on television. But this season's the first in which its creator is going to be writing about himself and his friends. I imagine they'll probably pull it off, but the early signs are not good.