Turn of the Century (38 page)

“If you’re about to use the word
coenable
, get out. And if this is some kind of an intervention, Alexi, you’re fired.”

Her telephone is doing its interoffice tweet. It must be Lance Haft. No one else in the office uses the intercom.

“E-mail and overnight it, Alexi.” She reaches for the phone. “Please. Hello, Lance.” She sighs. “Yes, I have. We are not going to accept the Microsoft proposal. I am not. I am we. Yes. Yes. Of course I’m aware of all my fiduciary obligations, Lance. No, I’m not saying the door is closed, I’m saying that today, five-point-five million for fifteen percent of the company is unacceptable.”

Barry Stengel and Jess Burnham have two monitors on, simultaneously watching MSNBC’s and CNN’s coverage of the California primary as Featherstone, Emily, and George sweep into the conference room. Hearing the CNN correspondent say that “our exit polling arguably has some potentially worrisome signs for the Gore camp” reminds George of how deeply uninteresting he finds most TV news, especially the bleating about politics. It never changes. There’s something Soviet in its unvarying tedium and one-note self-seriousness. You could take the tapes of the 1996 election coverage, dub in “Gore” instead of “Dole” and “Democrat” instead of “Republican,” and rerun them this year. Maybe on
Real Time
in November he’ll have them program
a computer to write and deliver live election results with voice-synthesis hardware and a digitally animated newsreader: “Based on our exit polling, the MBC is declaring.
Al Gore
. The winner in the state of.
Massachusetts
. By a.
Substantial
. Margin of.
Seven
. Percent. If that result holds up, that will give
Gore
an additional.
Twelve
. Electoral votes.” Artificial semi-intelligence. Just to upset the Barry Stengels of the world.

“Hey, Stinger! And my dear Ms. Burnham.” George has never before witnessed Featherstone addressing anyone except his own assistants and Harold Mose without a nickname—although, when he thinks about it, “Ms.” probably counts as a nickname. Neither stands, but Jess Burnham turns toward them and blasts a smile. Stengel, with a remote control in each hand, presses the mute button for both TVs, and gives a glum nod.

“Jess,” Featherstone says, “this is Emily Kalman, and—you must know George Mactier, don’t you? Couple of high-end journalistas like yourselves.”

George leans in to shake her hand. They have met twice—in 1996 on a tour of the
Titanic
set in Baja California (they were both playing hooky from the Republican convention in San Diego), and last spring under a tent in Central Park during MBC’s presentation of its new shows and stars.

“I don’t think I do,” she says, shaking his hand, “but I’m a big fan of your work.”

“Thanks,” George says. “This is my partner, Emily Kalman.”

“Timothy,” Stengel says without looking at George, “you know we need to be out of here by twelve-thirty. We’ve got a national security briefing at twelve forty-five with Ambassador Holbrooke, and Jess is locked into a one o’clock tape time with Senator Bradley.” We are serious. You are goofballs.

“Hey,
I’m mano a mano
with the
boss
at twelve forty-five, post-nap,” says Featherstone, chuckling, as he sits down at one end of the table, “so we will definitely wrap on time.” Mose famously naps at noon every day, since he also famously sleeps only three and a half hours a night. Last Christmas, Hank Saddler mailed out five thousand copies of the pro-napping bestseller
Always Rested and Rarin’ to Go: The Energizing Power of Just-In-Time Sleep Scheduling
, in which Harold is mentioned prominently. “And George and Emily have a few things on their plate, too, Barry—like producing the MBC’s megahit.”

George and Emily look at each other, each chagrined to be on Timothy Featherstone’s side in a shoving match, George thinking Stalin and Hitler, Emily thinking King Kong and Godzilla.

Hank Saddler appears, doing his speed-waddle, palms raised in some nonverbal sign of apology, smiling and nodding to everyone, especially Jess Burnham. George marvels at people in television who never get their appetite for star fucking slaked. Maybe that’s why they work in television. Saddler sits at the opposite end of the table from Featherstone, next to Burnham.

“So,” Featherstone says, “we know you have some concerns about the
Real Time
concept, Barry, and Harold and I—and George and Emily—want to give you a chance to get them out on the table from the get-go. This is transparency time, okay?”

Stengel turns to face George and Emily, pushing his elbows down hard on the table with a lot of body weight. This is clearly a man climbing onto a very high horse. His body language says,
I’d go over there and knock some goddamn sense into you if I could
.

“This fall, I will proudly celebrate my thirtieth anniversary in broadcast journalism,” he says.
Is that Tom Snyder you’re impersonating
, George thinks,
or Ted Knight?
“I’m proud of the news division we’ve created at the MBC, brick by brick, during the last year and a half. I’m proud of what we stand for.”
Which makes you prouder—your piece on the East Asian economic crisis where the segment producer had the twelve-year-old Thai prostitute repeat the fellatio three times so his crew could shoot cutaways, or the Golden Gate suicide where you enhanced the jumper’s midair scream—to make it, as you said at the time, “real but sweetened”? You were probably proud in a different way of your bulletin about Clinton’s nonexistent heart attack, and your two-hour special on the ex-wives and girlfriends of all this year’s presidential candidates (which didn’t even win its time slot against
Moesha
)
. “George, you’ve spent time in journalism. You paid a few dues. You used to do some very decent nonfiction work, as I recall.”
Fuck you, you patronizing, stupid, sanctimonious, middle-market news director asshole
. “I just don’t understand how you think you’re going to get away with actors playing broadcast journalists. Or journalists trying to act. Or whatever the hell you have in mind. Maybe it’ll get ratings. But it will probably damage American journalism, and it will definitely damage the reputation of MBC News.”

Stengel leans back in his chair, proud and spent. Saddler has been taking notes. Everyone looks at George.

“Well, as Timothy said, we do appreciate your concern,” George says. “And your confusion.” He turns to the anchor. “Jess,” he begins in the scrupulously neutral fact-finding tone with which journalists and prosecutors ask tendentious questions. “Do you write what you read on
NewsNight 1999?
On
NewsNight 2000
, I mean.”

Stengel rolls his eyes. Burnham half grins. They both know where George is going.

“I tinker,” Burnham says. “I polish.”

“But you deliver stories and lines other people write for you—you perform scripts drafted by members of the Writers Guild of America East, the same union my
NARCS
writers belong to.”

“I didn’t know that,” Featherstone says.

George is still looking straight at Burnham. “Before commercial, during your bumpers, when you’re still on air for that long shot of the studio—”

“The
newsroom
,” Stengel corrects.

“—why do you scribble notes, or frown and dial the phone, or collate sheets of paper?”

“Because I’m still on air.”

“Right.”

“Because if I checked my makeup or stretched or ate pistachios or pulled out my copy of
Martha Stewart
I’d look dopey.” She smiles at him.

“So you’re doing a performance of seriousness. You are a serious journalist.
And
you play one on TV.”

Stengel says to Featherstone, “This is just semantic goddamn BS.”

“Let’s say you turn to Bill Rossiter for cross talk after a piece about, oh, the president’s anal warts, and you feel like laughing—you don’t dare smile, right? You fake a very, very sober expression and tone of voice. Right?”

Her grin widens.

“Or when you have a live back-and-forth with a correspondent in the field,” George continues. “He knows what you’re going to ask, and you know all the answers to the questions you’re asking—so you have to
portray
curiosity. Right? That’s virtuoso acting. Or when you shoot the subject of a story pretending to talk on the phone or pretending to
examine a bullet hole in a doorframe. And at the top of the show every night, that jump-cut black-and-white taped piece of you and Bill and the producers interviewing and opening files and editing—was every bit of that real and spontaneous? And when correspondents do cutaways and ask their tough, probing questions to thin air—”

“Come off it, Mactier!” Stengel snaps. “There’s a hell of a big difference between standard packaging and presentational production value items, and a whole goddamn fake-news soap opera!”

“We’re not going to be making up news, if that’s what you think,” George says, staying calm, even smiling a little. “The news we deliver every week on the Friday show, on the news hour, will be one hundred percent bona fide. As straight and accurate and professional and real as anything you put on the air.”

Stengel makes a huffy whistling noise, half closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“You’re the pioneer in laying music tracks under straight news stories,” George says to him. “Didn’t you tell
Variety
that’s your ‘secret weapon’ against the major networks?”

“ ‘The
older
networks’ is the phrase we use, George,” Saddler corrects. “Not major,
older
.”

“On
Real Time
we won’t even go that far—no scoring of news stories. No reenactments, like I’ve seen Rossiter do on
Point Blank
.”
Point Blank
is the weekly MBC News crime show. “Some of our behind-the-scenes shots will be fictionalized, yes. The two half-hours earlier in the week are going to be scripted dramas—”

“Dramedies,” Featherstone interjects. “Dramedies.”

“—into which we intercut documentary footage, handheld stuff, cinema verité—shots of interview setups, travel, story meetings, editing sessions. The reporting will all be one hundred percent real. The difference is that we’ll shoot a lot more of ourselves doing it, and sometimes actors will be in the shots as well, delivering lines. It’ll be like—like two parallel universes that intersect.”

“How are viewers going to have any goddamn idea what’s real and what’s fake?” Stengel says. “They aren’t going to be able to keep your little game straight.”

George has not wanted to play the populist trump card because he isn’t sure he entirely believes it, but what choice does he have? The
hangover is emboldening, he realizes, the woozy sleeplessness overriding his usual reluctance to cut and jab. It’s triage: defend
Real Time
, destroy Stengel. He even decides to address Stengel by his first name, a Dale Carnegie gesture he loathes, like winking.

“I guess I disagree, Barry. I trust the audience to understand the difference. They aren’t thrown when people from CNN and the Sunday morning shows appear as themselves in movies, are they?”

“George,” Featherstone says excitedly, “show them those decks from audience research about what happens to anchors’ Q scores when they guest on
Leno
and
Letterman
.” He turns to Stengel and Burnham. “We’ve got actual evidence!” He turns back to George. “You have those before and after charts, G?”

“No. No, I don’t.” Because Iris didn’t overnight the files. So that’s what “decks” are.

“Our research proves that viewers totally understand the difference between truth and nonfiction,” Featherstone says. “Bill Clinton played the president on
NewsRadio
, and nobody was confused. Remember the celebs playing themselves on
Larry Sanders?
”

“That was HBO,” Stengel says.

He probably has a point
, George thinks. According to the MBC research, the lower a viewer’s income and education, the more apt he or she is to confuse entertainment and news, fiction and nonfiction. George isn’t about to cut Stengel any slack, however. He decides to take the full cheap shot.

“And we,” he says solemnly and slowly, “are the MBC, Barry.” Jesus, is he really making this speech? “As Harold says, the major networks—the older networks—were built on underestimating the intelligence of the American viewer. And now those networks are dying for the same reason. We’re supposed to be programming for the people out there who
get
it.”

“Harold’s line,” Saddler says, “is ‘insulting the intelligence of the North American viewer.’ ”

“You’re on a slippery goddamn slope here,” Stengel says. “News is news and entertainment is entertainment, and everyone knows the difference. No matter how you try to spin it.”

“Exactly,” George says, careful to maintain a friendly, collegial air. “Exactly. And every week Emily and I are going to be producing a little
less than one hour of news and a little more than one hour of entertainment. And everyone will know the difference.”

“That’s just such bullshit, Mactier. Glib, dangerous bullshit.”