Anthony Bourdain hoodwinked writer David Simon into sitting down for a CNN segment with the promise of a cronut, New York's most in-demand food trend. Sadly, that cronut never materialized, and now Simon wants his just desserts: "Tony Bourdain, you lying sonofabitch, you owe me a motherfucking cronut."

Television producer David Simon, who made his bones fictionalizing the foibles, corruption, and inescapable humanity of the City of Baltimore's public servants, has complete and unalloyed faith in the NSA's pure intentions in hoovering your telephone data until someone proves otherwise.

Earlier today, Mitt Romney made a big deal out of telling everyone that he's, "never paid less than 13 percent" in taxes. And, of course, he still won't provide his tax returns, so we'll just have to trust him, okay?

In your tremulous Tuesday media column: hard times ahead for magazines, the WSJ is batting .500, David Simon is (reasonably) touchy, investigative reporting may survive, and Weiner/ hole information.

Like most people, we miss HBO's fantastic cop show The Wire a great deal. So we were heartened to hear that Attorney General Eric Holder has put the full weight of the Justice Department behind our cause:

On Saturday, The Washington Post ran an item on a college class about HBO's The Wire. "There is nothing that makes me more optimistic about the future of the country," Wire creator David Simon reportedly said. Which is almost right.

David Simon, creator of The Wire, was among 23 recipients of the $500,000 MacArthur "Genius" grant. Clearly the MacArthur committee spent all last week watching The Wire instead of choosing geniuses and did this to justify their procrastination.

Last night was the premiere of Treme, the new show from The Wire's David Simon set in post-Katrina New Orleans. With all the artsy, smarty expectations placed on the project, how'd it fare? Well, pretty darn well.

The first full-length trailer for HBO's Treme, David Simon's second TV show after The Wire, features John Goodman, takes place in post-Katrina New Orleans, focuses on jazz, and looks like a can't miss. We. Cannot. Wait.

HBO released a teaser this week for David Simon's latest, Treme. This teaser features "the sounds of New Orleans" and doesn't give away much info about the show. Dedicated fans of The Wire, are you excited for this or not?

Remember Avon Barksdale from The Wire? He was west Baltimore's drug kingpin, played by Wood Harris. He was not to be messed with, because he would have your ass killed. Well this is his real story, shorty.

• Charlie Gibson is retiring as anchor of ABC's World News Tonight at the end of the year; he'll be replaced by Diane Sawyer, who is stepping down as anchor of Good Morning America to take the job. And now Brian Williams will soon be the only man anchoring a nightly network newscast. [NYP]
• The 66th installment of the Venice Film Festival kicked off today. [THR]
• Thanks to the success of Royal Pains and Burn Notice, USA has scored the highest summer ratings in the history of cable television. [B&C]
• Current TV's Laura Ling and Euna Lee have broken their silence and are now describing some of what happened when they were captured in North Korea. Not all it, though. You'll have to buy their book to read the rest. [LAT]
• Is Jared Kushner looking to unload the Observer? That's the rumor. [Gawker]

Rupert Murdoch announced plans yesterday to charge for online access to all of News Corp's media properties. Coincidentally, the company posted a $203 million loss for its fourth quarter, down from a profit of $1.1 billion from the same period last year.

Back in May David Simon, creator of The Wire, asked lawmakers to relax the nation's anti-trust laws so newspaper owners could get away with collusion. Now he's telling the New York Times and Washington Post to flout the laws completely.

The creator of the brilliant television series The Wire today asked Congress to legalize monopolistic collusion by newspapers. Only they can really cover City Hall, he said. Apparently he hasn't been there in a while.

In your blizzardy Monday media column: rumored layoffs at Men's Health, David Simon is righteously angry again, Ladies Home Journal's integrity—its most valuable asset, next to yarn—is questioned, and more!

From the creator of The Wire! Sort of! The Iraq miniseries Generation Kill premieres this weekend on HBO, with do-no-wrong David Simon linked as co-writer/executive producer of the seven-part event. The LA Times had a look and seems to have liked it fine, despite the fingerprints of journalist and source author Evan Wright having smudged some of the central characters' "expository dialogue."

In one month's time, David Simon will (hopefully) dazzle and depress us all over again. The mastermind behind The Wire, HBO's stunning and somber study of urban decay, has created a seven-part miniseries called Generation Kill, once again for HBO. The series, based on the Evan Wright book, depicts a group of Marines during the first forty days of the current clusterfuck debacle in Iraq. While we've not seen a screener or anything, we can certainly hope that Simon's ultra-realistic, carefully worded style will make the series as icky, uncomfortable, and thoroughly fascinating as The Wire. Above find a trailer for the series, below a brief clip of cast and crew talking about the project.

The Wire will never die, as long as die-hard followers like Culture Vulture still remember. Here, from the New York Magazine blog, is a wonderfully geeky frame-by-frame analysis of the final montage from David Simon's crime and corruption drama.

Credit where it is due: after a mid-season wobble, which shook my devotion to the foundation, The Wire has come together for the conclusion. David Simon's incredibly ambitious drama of crime and corruption in a decaying Baltimore has been compared by Slate's Jacob Weisberg, among others, to the sprawling novels of the 19th century. Most creators would be flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as Charles Dickens. Simon, who combines cynicism about the possibility of social change with complete faith in the importance of his art, makes grander literary references in a recent radio interview on NPR's Fresh Air. "We've been stealing from a lot of the Greek tragedies... Hubris, a willingness to challenge the gods, a willingness to engage in an argument against one's fate: the same things that Antigone or Oedipus struggled with we gave the same sort of dynamic to our characters... The gods are the post-industrial institutions of modern life. Whoever you serve. Wherever your paycheck comes from. Whatever calling you thought you had. On The Wire, there is every possibility it will betray you." Talk about hubris: such a claim would normally invite ridicule. But Simon, a frustrated former journalist, has defied the fate he's assigned to The Wire's heroes: the former journalist challenged the gods of television with a show that shouldn't have worked, and they let him succeed. After the jump, a clip from the interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.