The Wire Season 5 and the hyperreal serial killer

Scene from the wire wherein Mayor of Baltimore Thomas Carcetti is made aware of the simulated deaths of a number of homeless men. Earlier in the series Detective McNulty tampers with several crime scenes to fabricate a hyperreal narrative to the deaths, most of which are unrelated and/or natural. The use of this simulation was what Baudrillard would call 'operational negativity' (the Police departments' budget had been recently cut by the mayor), using media tactics to create a series of deaths and draw attention to the necessity of well-funded policing. In this series a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, Scott Templeton, covers the homeless murders for the paper, wherein he manufactures a great deal of hyperreal stories to benefit himself as a journalist. My favourite, and most relevant line is Norman Wilson's (Mayor Carcetti's deputy campaign manager) "They manufactured an issue to get paid, we manufactured an issue to get you elected as governer. Everybody's getting what they need behind some.. make-believe."

Portfolio Task 4 - Annotation

Charlie Brooker on Haiti

In the first part of this show, the Brooker looks at the medias' coverage of events in Haiti. What interested me the most, which is only a small segment of the report, is different governing bodies and medias use of the crisis for their benefit. Bill O'Reilly jumps at the chance to use other countries less generous economic benefits to Haiti as an opportunity to blow the American imperialist trumpet whilst Hugo Chavez is reported to have claimed the Haitian disaster was a result of an American "Earthquake inducing super-weapon".

This is incredibly relevant to the concept of hyperreal news reporting, wherein the narrative of a report is created in order to benefit a particular ideology.