For anyone who lived through the Marimow-Carroll era at The Sun, as I did, you'd know that, if anything, Simon is taking it easy on them in The Wire. If this was truly a personal vendetta against them, the material is there to make them look a lot worse, simply by describing some of their behaviors and quoting their own words. If you wanted to portray Marimow truly, you'd need to resurrect Sonny Bono, give him a greasy combover and have him salaciously eyeing the new hires while quoting from The Godfather to the veteran staff. "It's always personal," was the quote he favored.

Maybe that's why he and Carroll think it's about them. More likely, this is more or less a goodbye and a tribute to what once was a proud and fiesty institution and stems more from a remarkable sadness than it does from personal bile.

The real villain in this, if we're looking for villans, would be Reg Murphy, the publisher of The Sunpapers who engineered the sale to Times Mirror right after The News American folded. Perhaps he escapes criticism because it took a few years before the reality set in, which was that the locally-owned paper that had been it in for the long haul and had invested some of its profits back into the paper, was now a cash cow. Or maybe a better analogy would be sending grandmom out on the street to turn tricks.
The long parade of ambitious suits, of which Marimow and Carroll were only two of the worst, began shortly after that sale and hasn't stopped.

We may also thank our good friends in Congress who softened anti-trust regulations that allowed the corporate-owned Sun to buy up local weeklies that were cutting into their market and providing a last vestige of competition.

Of course, as others have noted, the Baltimore experience is not unique.