In gonzo journalism "You can’t be objective about Nixon"

In a way, Simon has brought to television a movement Tom Wolfe invented forty years ago in literature: New Journalism. New Journalism practitioners such as Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson blurred the line between literature and journalism, combining the writing techniques of the former with the investigative reporting of the latter to offer what was, in their view, a more accurate picture of the events they were covering. Looking at “The Wire,” it's easy to see how the show makes use of three of the four devices Wolfe lifted from literary fiction. The events on the show are framed as scenes, not a narrative time line of “This happened, so then this happened, so then this happened.” Dialogue is presented as conversation, not as sound byte. And the accuracy of the everyday details of life in Baltimore — the dialogue, the locations, the bits that, in the words of Simon himself, “build a whole city” — contributes to the immersion that is so integral to the program's success.

New Journalism got its start as a different way for a writer to tell his story — to put some subjective zing into an otherwise objective story. Sometimes, New Journalists realized, the obligation to tell the whole truth makes it necessary to include the subjunctive — the way a person or a place makes you feel. As Thompson once said to explain his use of his own brand of the form, gonzo journalism, for political reporting, “You can't be objective about Nixon.”

~ from "The Wire's" New Journalism ~