Television Review: Not for Attribution (The Wire, S5X03, 2008)

Not for Attribution (S05E03)

Airdate: January 20th 2008

Written by: Chris Collins
Directed by: Scot Kecken & Joy Kecken

Running Time: 58 minutes

David Simon’s much-maligned fifth season of The Wire, ostensibly dedicated to dissecting the crumbling edifice of Baltimore’s newspaper industry, arrives burdened by immense expectation. Yet, in its opening salvos, a palpable dissonance emerges. Where Season Four’s exploration of the education system felt immersive, visceral, and central to every narrative thread, Season Five’s promised media focus initially recedes into the background, operating with a frustrating opacity. This deliberate choice, compounded by the pervasive use of insider journalistic jargon – terminology utterly alien to the average viewer – creates a significant barrier to engagement. The very title of the third episode, Not for Attribution, exemplifies this issue. To the uninitiated audience member, it remains an obscure phrase, a coded whisper within the newsroom, rather than an immediately resonant dramatic device. This is a fundamental narrative strategy that risks alienating viewers precisely when the season most needs to hook them, making the media storyline feel less like the central pillar it was promised to be and more like a complex, secondary layer demanding prior knowledge it rarely provides.

The phrase "not for attribution" itself, crucial to the episode’s political machinations, refers to information a source provides to a journalist on the condition it can be quoted, but without naming the source. This stands in stark contrast to "off the record," where information is purely background, guiding the journalist but not directly quotable. In the hands of the politically ambitious Mayor Tommy Carcetti, this specific type of leak becomes a lethal weapon. Carcetti, having been deliberately fed falsified crime statistics by the duplicitous Commissioner Ervin Burrell, seeks Burrell’s scalp. His informant is the ever-opportunistic Stan Valchek, who, hoping to temporarily seize Burrell’s throne, supplies Carcetti with the damning real statistics alongside the deception. However, Carcetti’s ultimate target isn’t Valchek; it’s the seemingly impeccable Cedric Daniels. Before moving against Burrell, Carcetti must test the waters with key Black political figures like Councilwoman Nerese Campbell. To do this, he deploys his former journalist aide, Norman Wilson, to strategically leak his intention to appoint Daniels to The Baltimore Sun. The resulting article sparks initial elation in Daniels, swiftly extinguished by his politically astute ex-wife, Marla, now a council member herself. She delivers the chilling reminder that Burrell, cornered, would likely retaliate by unearthing the murkier, potentially scandalous details of Daniels’ early career – a stark illustration of how political ambition is inextricably tangled with personal vulnerability and the ever-present threat of character assassination within the city’s power structures. The "not for attribution" leak, intended to pave Daniels’ path, instead becomes a potential trigger for his downfall, demonstrating the perilous double-edged nature of media manipulation in the political arena.

Simultaneously, The Baltimore Sun itself is imploding from within, mirroring the decay of the institutions chronicled in previous seasons. Corporate overlords, panicked by plummeting advertising revenue and the existential threat of the internet, deliver brutal news: foreign bureaus shuttered, legendary reporters offered buyouts. When Gus Haynes nervously anticipates his own demise, he is instead handed a poisoned chalice – tasked by Managing Editor Thomas Klebanow and City Editor James Whiting to supervise a drastically reduced, younger team expected to produce the same output with fewer resources.This internal crisis is the suffocating atmosphere in which the political leaks and Carcetti’s manoeuvring must play out. The newsroom’s turmoil directly impacts its capacity to function as the city’s watchdog, a point hammered home, albeit clumsily, by the lengthy, almost reverential recitation of H.L. Mencken’s prose by the soon-to-be-ex-reporter Roger Twigg (Bruce Kirkpatrick). For many viewers, this moment feels ponderous, self-indulgent, and disconnected from the urgent street-level drama, highlighting the season’s struggle to make the slow death of journalism feel as viscerally compelling as a drug bust or a political backroom deal.

While the political and media spheres churn, the streets of West Baltimore remain lethally active. Marlo Stanfield, ever the expansionist, attempts a bold power play, seeking a direct connection with the powerful Greek organisation by approaching Vondas. His offer of a large cash sum is brusquely rejected; the money is "not clean," useless to sophisticated international operators. This humiliation forces Marlo to seek laundering expertise, turning to Proposition Joe. Joe, wary of Marlo’s volatility, reluctantly directs him to a bank in a French Caribbean territory. Crucially, Joe expresses strong disapproval of Marlo’s obsessive vendetta against Omar Little, seeing it as destabilising. However, Joe’s underling, Cheese, sees opportunity. Accepting Marlo’s money, Cheese betrays Omar’s former financier, the blind Butchie. The subsequent abduction by Snoop and Chris Partlow, the brutal torture, and Butchie’s defiant refusal to talk culminate in his execution. Chris, ever the strategist, spares one of Butchie’s bodyguards specifically to carry the news of the murder back to Omar, gambling that grief and rage will lure the legendary stick-up man out of Caribbean exile and back into Marlo’s deadly crosshairs – a gamble that appears poised to succeed as Omar receives the devastating news.

Amidst this institutional collapse and street violence, Jimmy McNulty’s descent into self-destructive madness reaches a new, audacious peak. His farcical plan to manufacture a serial killer – targeting homeless victims – intensifies as he meticulously sculpts evidence. Discovering a red ribbon on one unsolved case, he plants an identical one on another homeless victim’s body in the morgue, then pressures the medical examiner into ruling it a homicide. When the horrified Bunk Moreland drags Lester Freamon into the fray, expecting condemnation, they are stunned by Freamon’s pragmatic, almost gleeful endorsement. Lester not only accepts the scheme but actively refines it, advising McNulty to "sensationalise" the narrative, to craft a story so lurid and terrifying that the brass must allocate resources.

Written by Chris Collins and co-directed by Joy Lusco Kecken and Scott Kecken, Not for Attribution is undoubtedly a solid hour of television, weaving multiple complex threads with The Wire’s characteristic density. However, its critical weakness lies in a certain narrative diffuseness, particularly concerning the Sun storyline. The depiction of the newspaper’s demise, while undeniably important to David Simon’s overarching thesis about institutional failure, often tips into didacticism. The character of Gus Haynes, the principled city editor, functions far too transparently as Simon’s own mouthpiece. While the decline of local journalism is a vital societal issue, translating it into compelling drama proves elusive here. The intricate political chess game between Carcetti, Burrell, and Daniels, or the visceral, high-stakes violence of Marlo’s war against Omar, possess an inherent narrative propulsion that the internal struggles of the newsroom – the buyout meetings, the staffing cuts, the Mencken quote – struggle to match for the average viewer. The sheer weight of the newspaper’s institutional collapse feels abstract compared to the tangible human cost witnessed on the corners or in the police vans.

The episode finds far more resonant ground in its quieter moments with returning characters, moments that poignantly highlight the cyclical nature of Baltimore’s despair and fleeting sparks of humanity. The sight of Michael Lee, Dukie Weems, and Michael’s younger brother using drug money to experience a day of manufactured joy at Six Flags is heartbreakingly naive. Their brief escape into childhood wonder – a rarity in their harsh existence – is brutally curtailed as they are inevitably pulled back to the unforgiving reality of the corner. Similarly, McNulty’s self-immolation continues apace; his alcoholism deepens, yet amidst the ruin, Simon injects dark, uncomfortable humour. The scene where McNulty, having picked up a "cheap blonde" at a bar, proceeds with vigorous coitus bent over a car hood, only pausing to casually flash his badge at an inquisitive patrol car before resuming, is simultaneously pathetic and darkly comic. It’s a stark reminder of McNulty’s enduring, destructive charisma and his utter disregard for consequence, even as his world crumbles.

Significantly, Not for Attribution offers the first genuine glimpse of vulnerability in Marlo Stanfield. His mastery of the West Baltimore drug trade is absolute, yet thrust into the alien worlds of international finance and organised crime, he appears startlingly out of his depth. His humiliating failure to simply buy his way into Vondas’s organisation, and his subsequent helplessness in the Caribbean bank – reduced to frustrated gestures while the teller feigns incomprehension of English – strips away the aura of invincibility. He is a king dethroned the moment he steps beyond his concrete kingdom. This vulnerability is crucial, revealing the limitations of pure street power in a globalised criminal economy. Yet, the episode also underscores that Proposition Joe’s perceived weakness – his attempt to "civilise" Marlo, to bind him with rules and kinship – is ultimately his fatal miscalculation. Joe underestimated Marlo’s ruthless ambition and, more critically, overestimated the loyalty of his own underlings like Cheese. His efforts to manage Marlo inadvertently provide the young kingpin with the tools and connections needed to wage not just one, but potentially multiple future wars.

At the end, Not for Attribution functions as a microcosm of Season Five’s ambitious, flawed brilliance. Its very shortcomings – the initial backgrounding of the media theme, the jargon barrier, the moments of preachiness – are not accidental failures but deliberate reflections of Simon’s core argument: that the decline of vital institutions like journalism is complex, often opaque to the public, and unfolds amidst the relentless, more immediately visible crises of poverty, crime, and political corruption. While the Sun storyline may lack the visceral punch of Season Four’s schools, its integration with the political and criminal narratives creates a richer, more unsettling tapestry. It demands patience and rewards close attention, revealing that the most profound institutional failures are often the quietest, hardest to see, and easiest to ignore – precisely until it’s far too late.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo

InLeo: https://inleo.io/signup?referral=drax.leo
Leodex: https://leodex.io/?ref=drax
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9