Amanda Wakes Up

by Alisyn Camerota

  “I’ll check Wikipedia,” Topher said.

  “Is the guy talking to the press?” Fatima asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Jada said.

  “So try to get the guy and the girlfriend. And if they won’t do it, get a pro-life nut and a pro-choice type. Perfect T and E. This’ll be good.” She folded her laptop. “Let’s hear it for a great first show, guys!”

  Everyone clapped, but I was still annoyed. The producers started filing out and I tapped Topher on the back. “Hey, do you have a second?”

  “Sure, what’s up?” he asked, grabbing his bright yellow concoction and turning his wide face toward me.

  “I wanted to talk about the segment you produced. With Dove.”

  “Yeah, great job with that, by the way,” he said. “You got a few fireworks there.”

  I cocked my head at him. “I don’t think so, Topher. I didn’t know what he was talking about with voter fraud—or climate change for that matter. You didn’t put any research in the packet.”

  “Oh, I emailed you. Dove wasn’t available for a preinterview.”

  “I know. But you still have to provide facts. You have to search for anything he’s ever said on these issues from other sources and fact-check those comments. Plus he was sitting in the greenroom for two hours. You could have preinterviewed him then.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said, like that brilliant thought had never crossed his mind.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said, pressing my head toward his to impress the notion into his skull, “I need to know beforehand about his claims of busloads of immigrants and flushed ballots and illegal registration. We can’t be blindsided on the air like that. It makes us look bad and it only confuses the viewers.”

  “Yeah, but you challenged him, so we’re covered on T and E.”

  I stared at him for a second, waiting for the punch line. “Topher, that’s not good enough. We need facts. You didn’t get a statement from local poll watchers or the election commission. We didn’t confirm that there are active investigations or real signed affidavits. You need to produce these segments.” I scanned his open face for a glimmer of understanding.

  He looked at me blankly. “But we didn’t say any of that. He did.”

  “I know. But we need to give the viewers real information, not wild claims from our guests, okay? I can’t believe you haven’t gotten into trouble before now.”

  “Oh, I have,” he said brightly. “I used to work at Channel Eight in Hartford. Remember when they reported that Admiral Fanning of the Joint Chiefs had seen a UFO?”

  “No,” I said slowly.

  “Well, that was wrong, apparently. That turned out to be fake news from a satire website. But, you know, it looked really real.”

  “I rest my case,” I said, gathering my bags. “So when you’re producing for me, please send facts.”

  “You got it,” he said, offering a fist bump to seal the deal.

  • • •

  “Hi, Amanda!” Melissa jumped off her treadmill and bounded toward me as I approached Benji’s office. “You were a-maze-balls today. We all came in early for the launch and watched the show up here on that huge monitor. You were so good with Dove! And I loved the Gisele Bündchen segment. What was she like? Was she nice? And you looked beautiful.”

  “Oh, thank you,” I said. I didn’t want to be so flattered by comments on my looks, but I was, and I was relieved that Melissa couldn’t detect the Roberta makeup disaster.

  “Benji’s waiting for you!” Melissa clapped her hands together, quickly but quietly, in excited silent applause.

  “Come here, you superstar!” Benji called from the threshold of his office. “How ya feeling?”

  “Great,” I lied, realizing today might not be the day to share my concerns over the amateurish producing.

  “You should be! I think we truly made morning show history.” Benji grabbed the remote off his desk to mute the monitors in his office playing the other networks, then said “Jesus!” and gestured up at the screen. “What is Jane wearing?”

  I glanced up to see Jane, the nine-to-eleven anchor, looking stern and clad in chartreuse.

  “Come on!” Benji yelled at the TV. “Lime green? What is Meg doing to me? Melissa!” he yelled out his door. “Call Meg and tell her to burn that dress Jane’s wearing.” He shook his head at me and sat down. “Anyway, great, great show today. I mean, groundbreaking. Did you see all the pickup you’re getting? It’s better than I could have hoped for. Great idea having Dove on today. What a way to launch!”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to match his enthusiasm. “But do you think we should be worried that he made lots of wild claims about voter fraud?”

  “He sure as hell made news! But yeah, you should check out what he was saying. That’d be a great coup for you. Get to the bottom of it. That would totally put you on the map. I mean, that’s star stuff.”

  I liked the sound of that. Yeah, I don’t need Topher. I’ll get to the bottom of stuff and break stories myself! “You’re right. I’ll do that.”

  “And I don’t think any other network has ever devoted its morning show to climate change,” he went on. “Oh, and I loved the Gisele Bündchen thing you did. How hot was she in person?”

  “Oh, very attractive. But, on the climate change issue,” I said, balling up my hand and pressing my knuckles to my chin, “you know, I worry we might have left the viewers a tad confused. I mean, we never really gave a definitive answer on whether the Earth is warming or cooling or whether it’s cyclical or man-made or what to do about it.”

  “Oh, well, come on,” he said, giving me a what-do-you-expect look, “don’t beat yourself up over that. You’ve got, what, six minutes tops for those segments? You’re not going to solve global warming in six minutes. And by the way, our research shows that viewers in the morning only watch in five-minute chunks. So really you’re just planting a seed. You know, again, broadcasting.” He smiled because we both got the reference.

  “But what I really liked about what you did,” he went on, “is that you had on those two kooks, those two deniers, but you didn’t call them kooks or deniers, you let them have their say. And that way, you get the normal news watchers and you get that twenty-five percent of the country that’s in denial. And hey, you had that congresswoman on who thinks they’re dangerous, so maybe they all learned a little something about each other today.”

  I turned to stare out Benji’s giant window looking over Midtown, pondering that one.

  “Look here,” Benji said, leaping up and snatching a sheet of paper off his desk. “This will blow your mind. This is a map of the U.S. from the last presidential race broken down by political party.”

  He handed me the paper, showing the country covered in big red splotches and some bright blue dots up and down the coasts and sprinkled in the middle. “This is a red versus blue country. But most of it is red, by the way, which I know is like completely crazy, right? And there’s not a single network that caters to all these people until now. At FAIR News, we don’t think red versus blue, we think purple. We’re the Purple Party. We’re not dividing people. We’re bringing them together.”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, who doesn’t like purple?” he asked. “In fact, has Meg given you some purple dresses? You should make that your signature color. You know what would be great? What if you died your hair that purple color that you see around now?”

  “Wait, really?”

  “You know, the color all the millennials are doing on their hair. I saw Kelly Ripa with it the other day. It could be great for the demo. Think about it. Oh, that reminds me, you looked like hell this morning.”

  “What?”

  “What did Jess do to your face?”

  “Oh!” I said, a feeling of chagrin creeping up my cheeks. Leave it to Benji to tell me the truth. “I h
ad to go to Roberta. Jess was too busy doing Margot. She said you insisted on it.”

  “Oh, right. Margot,” he said, then shook his head. “God. That girl is sooo fucking nice. Do you know what she said when I told her that you were getting the morning slot, not her?”

  “No, what?”

  “She said, ‘Well, if that’s God’s will, then I’m sure that’s the right plan.’ She thinks Jesus Christ made the decision! Anyway, I had to throw her a bone, so I said she could go to Jess. Can’t you go after her?”

  “Well, no, I need to be downstairs with the producers, prepping.”

  “So go before.”

  “Jess doesn’t come in until four.”

  “Oh. That’s a problem. I can’t pay her any overtime. We gotta bring this show in on budget. Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” he said, standing and signaling our time had run out.

  Chapter 13

  Good Get

  “You know what I think would be a good segment for you?” Charlie said. “There’s a great piece in the Economist on the cultural underpinnings of the EU’s bloated bureaucracy. You know, all the precursors to Brexit. I was thinking that could be good material for your show. You could go to the Council on Foreign Relations and get different voices on how Europe got to this point.”

  I pressed my fingers to my lips, trying to nod thoughtfully, to keep myself from smiling at how adorable Charlie was being. I could tell he felt bad about criticizing the show and was trying to transition to helpful-suggestion mode. He wasn’t going to criticize Wake Up, USA! He was going to turn it into PBS.

  “Or,” he went on, “you could find a history professor. I mean, not me, of course, I don’t want to be on camera, but at Yale or somewhere, who could give you all the historical reference points for what’s happening with Fluke. All of his Successful Man crap. There are similarities with 1968 and George Wallace and the race-baiting, immigrant-hating stuff. You could even go back to Alexander Hamilton and examine that era. Anyway, that would be a provocative piece.”

  I bit my upper lip to keep from laughing and turned to my right to look at Laurie, seated at my tiny kitchen table.

  “Provocative,” Laurie repeated, looking at me like she, too, was about to burst out laughing at Charlie’s idea of good TV. “And maybe the New York Review of Books has something really juicy coming out on the Constitutional Convention of 1787,” she said. And then we couldn’t contain ourselves and started giggling.

  “What?” Charlie said.

  “I’m pretty sure nothing in the Economist has ever found its way onto cable news,” I said. “In fact, Rob Lahr told me this morning to ignore all my newspaper clippings. He only reads Page Six in the New York Post. Probably to spot himself. He prepares for the show by studying Mediaite.”

  “He sounds like a Nobel Laureate,” Charlie said. “You want more wine, Laur?”

  She nodded and he poured, then looked my way. I waved away his offer. My new job, I realized with some regret, would forevermore make a weeknight glass of wine impossible.

  “Look, I’ll be honest,” Charlie said. “You were great, babe, but I don’t understand why FAIR News would give a megaphone to Arthur Dove. And your climate change guests were complete crackpots.”

  “Actually, they’re not,” I started. “One of those deniers is a professor at Princeton and the other the president of the National Academy of Sciences. So they’re legit. Do you know that twenty-six percent of the country doesn’t believe in global warming?”

  “That’s exactly the danger of doing segments like the ones you did this morning!” he said, growing exercised. “You feed the ignorance.”

  Charlie’s reaction gave me a sinking feeling. I liked Benji’s better. “But see, that’s the point,” I said. “FAIR News isn’t going to pretend that a quarter of the country doesn’t exist. We’re going to talk to them.”

  “Amanda, they sounded like imbeciles,” Charlie said. “They were making stuff up.”

  “Well, no. Here’s the crazy part. Everything they said—and the stuff Dove said about global warming—was actually true. I looked it up after the show. According to NASA, the ice did increase in the Antarctic and the Himalayas. Oh, and by the way, scientists at East Anglia University did put out bogus research. See, this is the stuff the deniers hang their hats on. I never understood why they reject science until now. I mean, obviously they’re wrong. They don’t do deep enough research. But they’re not making it up.”

  I said it slowly, waiting for lightning to strike me at the table or for Laurie to call me out for conspiring with Dove the Devil. But Laurie was looking down, checking her phone.

  “Amanda, as the great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.’”

  “But that’s the problem,” I told Charlie. “Dove did come with his own facts. That’s what the Internet has done. It’s given everyone their own facts.”

  “As Nietzsche said, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations,’” Laurie declared.

  “Who are you?” I asked her.

  “I have an app,” she said. “It sends me a daily philosophy factoid.”

  “Well, there you have it,” I told Charlie, gesturing at Laurie. “There are no facts, only factoids. Anyway, tomorrow’s going to be an interesting show. Benji thinks we should do it on abortion. There’s this woman who wants an abortion, but her ex-boyfriend is suing to stop her because he wants the kid. We booked the VP of NARAL. And I gotta hand it to this young producer, Jada. She convinced the boyfriend to come on even though he’d never done any TV.”

  “That is a good get,” Laurie said, without looking up.

  “I guess I don’t understand your business,” Charlie said, putting his glass down on the table. “I mean, why give this antiabortion guy airtime? It’s not his choice.”

  “Because it’s good TV,” Laurie said.

  “But you’re going to have to dismantle his argument,” Charlie told me. “You should do a background check on the guy. I bet he’s a shill for one of these shadow antiabortion operations that stages undercover stings at clinics.”

  “He doesn’t sound like it,” I said. “I read up on him. He’s a fifth grade teacher. He has a son from a previous marriage, coaches Little League. In the deposition, it sounds like he really wants the kid. I don’t think this is political for him. This is personal.” I was starting to feel strangely defensive—like Charlie thought he knew this story and subject better than me. “And it’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it this way,” I went on. “Why are the father’s needs overruled by the mother’s? You know? He wants this child.”

  “Because it’s a woman’s body,” Charlie said.

  “Right. Of course. But it’s his kid, too.”

  “But, babe, if you got pregnant, should I be the one to make the decision whether you have it?”

  “Wow,” Laurie said, looking up with wide eyes like we’d just woken her. “Didn’t think you’d go there.”

  I paused. “Well, when you put it that way.” I knew we could leave it at that. But something felt unfinished. Was that the lens I was supposed to apply to news stories: my own life? Because if so, I did have experience with the subject of pregnancy and its prevention. I could still summon the memory of the redbrick exterior of the clinic. In high school, I would routinely steer nervous friends into its parking lot, assuring them they had nothing to worry about; the clinic wouldn’t call their parents to tell them their daughters wanted birth control. Usually everything went perfectly and we’d bound out of the building an hour later, brown bag filled with pills in our hands. Mission accomplished. But one day was different: that horrible rainy morning when I skipped school and secretly headed to my friend Dani’s street to find her waiting on the corner. She’d snuck away from the bus stop. We drove silently into Planned Parenthood’s parking lot again. I guided her i
nto the empty waiting room. We didn’t really talk. I knew all I needed to about how she’d gotten into this situation—her strict Korean parents had found her pills and thrown them out, grounded her, and screamed at her, threatening to send her far away to an all-girls school.

  The nurse came and ushered Dani behind a closed door while I stared at the same page of a fashion magazine in the waiting room, trying not to imagine what was happening. When Dani reappeared an hour later, she was limp, seemingly drugged or just emotionally crushed, I couldn’t tell. I never for a second, before or after that, thought abortion should be illegal, but I did think it was harder on everyone than both sides let on. And I loved Planned Parenthood for doling out all that free birth control to try to keep Dani’s situation from happening. I shook my head and snapped back to my kitchen table with Charlie, who I knew didn’t have any real-life experience with this.

  “I mean, aren’t I supposed to give both sides of the abortion debate and let the viewers decide?” I said.

  “You’re supposed to look at the facts. And the fact is that abortion is legal and the Supreme Court has ruled it’s the woman’s decision. And I don’t think you should provide any fodder to change that.”

  “I just think the father has a right to tell his side,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never really thought about the guy’s feelings. Wouldn’t you want to be part of the decision?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Charlie said. “But ultimately, it’s not my decision.”

  “Are we still on the abortion topic?” Laurie asked, looking up.

  I scratched my head and looked away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m working on something. I might be sitting on a Fluke bombshell.”

  “Sounds uncomfortable,” I muttered.

  “Fluke bombshell?” Charlie asked, perking up and rubbing his hands together. “What is it?”

  “No story before it’s time, my friends. I need to vet it with legal before I can bust this wide open.” Sometimes when Laurie got excited, she sounded like Nancy Drew.

  “Just give us a little something, Laur,” Charlie chided her in that way that people not in the news business sometimes did. As if things like exclusives, and confidentiality, and off-the-record agreements were just things we made up to feel important. “Give us a clue.”