1. Ethos
or the ethical appeal, means to convince an audience of the author’s credibility or character.
An author would use ethos to show to his audience that he is a credible source and is worth listening to. Ethos is the Greek word for “character.” The word “ethic” is derived from ethos.
How does The Wire make an appeal using ethos?
Aristotle coined the terms

2. Logos
or the appeal to logic, means to convince an audience by use of logic or reason.
How does The Wire appeal to logic?

3. Pathos 
or the emotional appeal, means to persuade an audience by appealing to their emotions.
How does The Wire appeal to our emotions?

4. Ethnography Systematic study of people and cultures
The observation comes from the point of view of the subject of the study
Field study reflects the knowledge of the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group
“Should collect information in the context or setting where the group works or lives. This is called fieldwork. Types of information typically needed in ethnography are collected by going to the research site, respecting the daily lives of individuals at the site and collecting a wide variety of materials”
--Wikipedia

5. “ethnographic imaginary”
World enough and time
“I am looking for a different, less stereotyped and more significant
place for the reception of ethnographically produced knowledge
in a variety of academic and non-academic forms…Tracing
and describing the connections and relationships among sites
previously thought incommensurate is ethnography’s way of
making arguments and providing its own contexts of significance”

6. Simon’s style of TV speaks to this idea
Makes arguments, sets up contexts that could not be managed in journalism alone
Serial television melodrama, according to Williams, makes possible the larger canvas of the ethnographic imaginary

7. Combined factual, ethnographically observed, and detailed worlds of cops and corners into one converged fictional world

8. Season 1 Breaks crime story conventions Introduces a crime
A cop who pursues solving the crime
Higher ups who have no interest in solving the crime
Doesn’t stay with the cop, but moves to the complex world of the committer of the crime
Humanizes that character as well
Equally important procedures of cops and dealers are introduced

9. Comparison between two microsites
Cops who want to be good and cops who just want to bust heads
Competent drug dealers vs. ones who lack the discipline to avoid capture

10. Complexity of the Series’ microsites (plotlines)
Politics
Different police details
Education
Co-ops
War on drugs and “Hamsterdam”
Etc.

11. The vivid and interlocking stories from so many concrete ethnographic sites is what fiction affords, what ethnography aspires to, and what newspaper journalism can rarely achieve
Multi-sited ethnographic imaginary that no longer needs to depend on allusions to abstract ideas of “the state,” “the economy”, or “capitalism” as its “fiction of the whole”
The many sites reveal a vivid picture of that “whole”

12. Simon had to quit the business he loved and turn to television
Hasn’t fully embraced the form
Hence the comparison to Greek Tragedy?

13. John Carroll and Bill Marimow
From Baltimore Sun (criticized “The Metal Men—1995”
Said it was too much like “The Corner” and that it wasn’t hard enough on the thieves
Simon believed that newspapers should adopt a wide sociological approach to the city’s problems
His editors thought he should be more clear and focused on right and wrong

14. Rifle-Shot Journalism
One story is small and self-contained and has good guys and bad guys
The other is about why we are where we are
About who is being left behind
Harder to report
Carroll and Marimow saw them as performing a public service that can’t reach for the larger ethnographic complexities

15. Rifle-Shot vs. Multi-Site
Rifle shot is like a half hour of episodic television whose world is necessarily narrow and whose time is limited to a half hour or hour
In contrast, Simon’s reporting presented an expanded world view
Transforms a social “type” to a human being

16. White Middle Class Editorializing
In The Corner, his editorializing has an identity
In The Wire he shows instead of telling
(Which is more truthful?)

17. In place of the five-paragraph rifle-shot story he would eventually create a five- season cumulative serial whose primary outrage-a futile war on drugs-encompasses myriad others
Serial melodrama can show us, in a way sociologists and ethnographers cannot, how much as Detective Lester Freamon puts it, “all the pieces matter.”

18. Serial Drama Segmented quality
Moves from place to place and also creates: Parallels, Contrasts, and Interruptions
Must parcel out (often melodramatic) units of information that grab attention
Also grabs attention through stories about compelling characters facing difficult obstacles

19. Ta-Nehisi Coates
Progress of white people (those who believe they are white) is built on violence
“Government of the people” what has the US considered the word people to mean?
Race is the child of racism and not the father—it is not about genealogy or physiognomy, but about hierarchy
Read page 71

20. Hegemony
before white people were white they were Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish
domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society 
so that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.[1][2]

21. American Exceptionalism
America believes itself exceptional—we should accept American innocence at face value—
Coates holds America to that high standard

22. Destruction of the Black Body
Coates, speaking to his son, speaks of the vulnerability and danger
He doesn’t view police brutality as “a few bad apples,” but that the police are “Correctly enforcing the whims of our country”
Page 10—page 11 the dream
“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body”

23. “personal responsibility”
Vulnerability of the black body is not an accident or a pathology, it is correct and intended policy of a society
“the other world was suburban and endless, organized by pot roasts, blueberry pies, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms and small toy trucks”
“personal responsibility”
Page 22 top of page
Page 29 top of page

24. Certainty
Constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty
Current views on implicit bias training is unnecessary
“The dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing”