In prior seasons, “The Wire” examined Baltimore’s drug culture, its politics, its unions and its schools. Many critics have called it the best show on television, despite a lack of Emmy recognition and relative scarcity of viewers. (The show typically draws 1.6 million compared with "The Sopranos'" 8.9 million.)

This season's "Wire" knows of what it speaks. Its creator, David Simon, spent 13 years in the Sun’s newsroom as a police reporter, and he draws amply on that experience. The season is subtitled, “Read Between the Lines.” The story it tells reflects what's happening in newsrooms across the country.

The evil force here is Tribune Co., which acquired the Sun when it bought up the string of big-city papers assembled over the years by the late Otis Chandler, whose family long owned the Los Angeles Times. The chain was particularly attractive to Tribune because Chandler had invested so much building them into good papers. That meant all the more could be drained out through budget slashing, which Tribune has taken up with a vengeance.

Sunday's episode finds the newsroom dealing with a new round of staff cuts handed down from corporate.

In telling the story of the Sun, long among the most regarded papers in America, "Wire" puts a human face on those cutbacks. It reveals the bleak landscape of American journalism, in which job cuts have translated directly into a decline in the quality of journalism in cities across the country.

Simon has promised the series will expose “what stories get told and what don’t.”

It’s the stories that aren’t being told that should concern journalists and non-journalists alike. The mantra across today’s newsrooms is doing more with less, which means fewer reporters and greener reporters.

But fewer and greener reporters means fewer well-reported, well-grounded stories, stories without grit and often without intelligence. It's what people said happened, not what really happened, because the reporter didn't know the right questions to ask, or didn't have the time, or had an editor pushing him to move on to the next story.

There's still a lot of brilliant newspaper reporting going on in America. One example is The Washington Post’s recent uncovering of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But there are fewer of them.

The bigger problem is the decline in the quality of day-to-day coverage at papers across the country, the journeyman reporting by experienced pros that America's readers have come to rely on. In place of their reporting readers will be fed more and more stories about hotel chain heiresses caught driving drunk sans underwear.

It's worth raising a ruckus over. That's what Simon has set out to do, and bless him for it.

As he explains in an interview posted on the HBO web site, “It made sense to finish ‘The Wire’ with this reflection on the state of the media, as all the other attendant problems of the American city depicted in the previous four seasons will not be solved until the depth and range of those problems is first acknowledged. And that won't happen without an intelligent, aggressive and well-funded press.”