I smiled, remembering my favorite one. In it, Fluke was riding a horse and, at the same time, shooting a bow and arrow at a target. The commercial was hilarious because Fluke was actually shooting the bow backward, behind his back, while the horse was in full gallop. Oh, and Fluke was blindfolded. Come to think of it, so was the horse. But Fluke made a bull’s-eye, of course. Then the announcer said, “There must be something the World’s Most Successful Man can’t do. But no one can remember what that might be.” I shook my head at the absurdity of that guy now considering a run for president. Impossible.
I paced around, trying to rehearse the lines I’d practiced in my head on the ride over: Hello, Mr. Diggs. Shit. Too formal. Hi, Benji! Better. If you’ve by chance seen that silly link to my inappropriate attire at the post office shooting, ha, ha, ha, so silly! let me assure you of my solid journalism credentials. I went to college on an academic scholarship, majored in broadcast journalism, graduated with honors. Got my first job as a desk assistant with Gabe Wellborn, America’s Premier Newsman, helping to produce his award-winning nightly newscast (I should probably omit that my most pressing job duty was “producing” tomato juice for Gabe’s lunch). I got my first on-air job in teeny Salisbury, Maryland, then jumped to Roanoke, Virginia, and now Newschannel 13. I made a mental note to tell Diggs that years ago I’d read his memoir on his rise from paperboy to radio host to media mogul. At that, my stomach made a noise so loud that I was sure Melissa heard it. I shouldn’t have had that Filet-O-Fish sandwich.
“Hey, you!” I heard a man’s voice say, and until that very moment I hadn’t realized how familiar that voice was to me: a smooth, broadcast baritone, ubiquitous yet unique. I thought for a second the TV was talking to me, until I heard footsteps and turned to see Benji Diggs, fit and tan in a slim-cut navy suit with just two buttons, which screamed custom made. His trousers were an inch or two shorter than I was used to, which I worried was a dry cleaning error until I saw he had eschewed socks and had unusually handsome ankles. His caramel-colored shoes were a shade lighter than I’d ever seen on a man, with a patina I’d only spotted in ads for Italian footwear. I had to force my eyes up as his feet strode out from his office and moved across the waiting room toward me.
Shorter than I’d expected, Benji was roughly my height in heels, and slight. I should have known. Television personalities were always smaller in person than they appeared on screen. In college, my journalism professor claimed I’d be successful on TV, not only because I worked harder than my classmates, but because I had what he deemed the winning combination: big head, small body. Something in common, Benji Diggs and me. I turned toward Benji, extending my right hand, which he breezed by.
“I’ve watched you so much this past week,” he said, opening his arms wide, “I feel like I already know you.” And then Benji Diggs pulled me into a tight embrace.
“Oh, okay,” I said into his shoulder.
“Let me have a look at you,” he said, taking a step back but holding my hands tightly, like we were long lost friends who’d just reunited. “You’re much better looking in person,” he said, keeping his eyes locked on mine for about three beats too long, as if drinking me in. “The camera is not doing you justice. But not to worry!” he said, launching his first finger into the air. “We will fix that! Follow me!” He turned and took double-speed strides back to his office. “Let’s really get to know each other.”
“Um, sure,” I said, breaking into a jog behind him.
“Come in,” he said, turning to face me and walking backward. “Make yourself at home. What would you like? Sparkling water? A cappuccino? I can have Melissa run out and get us these awesome green juices. There’s one with kale and green apple and celery. I’m off carbs so I live on these things. You want one?”
“Oh, no, thanks.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you. They’re horrible.” Benji made a sweeping gesture with his arm, then sat down and patted the spot next to him on his black-and-white cowhide sofa that looked exactly like the one I’d just seen on the cover of Architectural Digest.
“So,” he said.
“So,” I repeated after about two seconds, unsure if that was my cue or his windup.
“So let me tell you what we’re doing here,” he said, locking his hands together and stopping to take a big inhale, as though this were the first time he’d ever confessed this to anyone. “We’re changing the face of cable news. I mean, it’s that simple, yet that monumental. Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Right now, you’ve got Fox for conservatives and MSNBC for liberals and CNN for news junkies—and then, of course, the big networks, ABC, NBC, BNN, and CBS, which are dying a slow, painful death in front of all our eyes. Now, why would anyone in their right mind want to add another news network to that?” He paused and looked at me.
“Um . . . because we need more,” I said, without the right conviction.
“No! Because we need less!” he exclaimed. “All that cable news has done is divide this country in half. You’ve got liberals and conservatives, red and blue, black and white, right and wrong, okay? Now what if . . . what if”—he paused dramatically to let his hypothetical hang midair—“what if, there could be one news network that would have all of those in one place? What if the point were not to divide the country, but to bring everyone together? Because, you know, the other networks want you to think there are only polar extremes. But maybe there’s a whole unexplored world in the middle where both sides can coexist. You know?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding but not really knowing.
“Now imagine this: What if you had one-stop shopping for news consumers? What if Republicans and Democrats, midwesterners and northeasterners, old and young, could all watch the same news network?” He stopped and looked at me, his eyes so lit up they glinted.
“I can’t really imagine that,” I admitted, struggling with what to do with my hands before deciding to just sit on them.
“Look, the election is a little more than a year from now. And history tells us there is no better ratings driver than a presidential race, so the timing here is perfect. We’re going to get all these polarized groups that hate each other out of their echo chambers and into one room to hear each other for the first time. And why stop there? Maybe FAIR News can help them come up with solutions. Let’s dissolve the left-right paradigm. Enough of this binary model.”
Uh-oh. The double whammy of “paradigm” and “binary” almost disconnected my neurotransmitters and put my brain into sleep mode. Those two words taken individually always had a soporific effect on me—but at the same time? I feared a blackout coming on and forced my eyelids extra open to show how interested I was in whatever it was he’d just said.
“Look, I’m just spitballing here. My point is, TV news has the power to polarize—and God knows others have made a fortune doing that—but it also has the power to bring people together. And that’s what I want to do. Let’s create a solution-oriented model.” He put his hands together and interwove them to show me how easily it could be done.
“Well, that would be incredible,” I admitted. I liked the sound of Benji’s vision. Just last week, I had been telling Charlie how I longed for a time when the news was just the news, meaning purveyor of useful information, rather than a lightning rod of controversy. Back when Mom and I watched at the breakfast table, after the final fight when she’d told Dad to get out. Back then the news wasn’t open for debate. That seemed a more peaceful time—before cable news created crazy conversations and drove a wedge into the world.
“You know, I was just saying this last week,” I told Benji, leaning forward toward him on the sofa. “It’s impossible to watch the news without seeing some loudmouth Bill O’Reilly type getting into a shouting match with some Rachel Maddow wannabe. I mean, when I was growing up, my mom and I would watch the news every morning to learn about the world. But now the news has turned into a
mortal combat cage match.”
“Mortal combat cage match! I like that!” Benji said. “We should name a show that. Ironically, of course, because at FAIR News we won’t make guests fight each other. We’ll make them hear each other. More like Mind-Blowing Fairness Forum. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I said, but even I could hear my skepticism.
“It’s possible,” Benji said. “Do you know that Walter Cronkite had a hundred and twenty-five million viewers for the first moonwalk? One hundred and twenty-five million! Think about how many more TVs there are today, yet no one brings in those numbers. I mean Fox gets, what? A million or two a day? And they trumpet that like it’s a huge success. What if we could get fifty million throughout the day? A hundred million? The sky’s the limit with this because we’ll have something for everyone. Now, I know, I know, ‘millennials don’t watch TV,’” he said, rolling his eyes and making air quotes with his fingers. “‘Kids are glued to their iPhones.’ That’s fine. They don’t have to sit down and actually watch TV. We’ll give them content streaming on their devices; we’ll be a newsroom without walls, blah, blah, blah. The point is, we’ll get the twenty-five to fifty-four-year-old demo, and even early twentysomethings will come to us, because again, we’re the only ones who’ll give you all the information in one place, all sides. It’s so retro it’s revolutionary!”
“Wow, that’s pretty ambitious,” I said, unsure whether to challenge his prediction of millions in this new niche-targeted world.
“Look, I’ve run the numbers,” he said, reading my mind, “and I see the path to get there. Add up all the morning shows and all the evening newscasts and all of cable and you get some pretty impressive numbers. I believe we can even bring some of the cord cutters back for big news. Hey! Do you know where the word ‘broadcast’ comes from?”
I scratched my head, trying to channel Professor Jordan from my Journalism 101 class.
“It’s an old farming practice,” he went on, “of casting out seeds broadly, scattering them to take root. I mean, how great is that? Let’s get back to that notion of seeds and ideas being planted.”
“I love that,” I told him, and I did. I was starting to see why Benji Diggs was such a visionary.
“You gotta think big. You can’t accomplish what I have in my career and not think big and dream bigger. No one thought The Impossible Dream! would last even one season. But look at it! It’s been on almost twenty years. I can’t believe it myself. I look at that twenty-two-year-old kid in those photos and I can’t believe that’s me. But it’s time to do it again. It’s time for the next Big Bold Benji Diggs Dream.”
“That’s exciting,” I said, wondering if at any point we’d get around to talking about my role in the Benji Bonanza.
“And that’s where you come in,” Benji said, taking my hand. “This vision sounds simple, but it’s not—and not everyone will understand what we’re trying to do here. But I think you do.”
“I think I do,” I said quickly.
“Good, because this is going to require a different kind of journalist, one who’s more evolved. Believe it or not, I wouldn’t hire Walter Cronkite now.”
“No?”
“I mean, number one, he’s dead.”
“Right.”
“Number two, he’d be bad for the demo. You can’t have an old guy with a comb-over competing with David Muir, who looks like Adonis, okay? But more important, no one wants their anchor or reporter to broadcast down from on high, devoid of feeling and emotion. They want to see broadcasters as human. And I think you have a human quality.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“I saw that interview you did with that cop’s wife. You teared up there, didn’t you?”
Oh, no. How unprofessional. “Well, see, we’d been working for fourteen hours and it was extremely hot,” I explained, so Benji would think he’d seen sweat, not sadness.
“Stop,” he said, reaching out his finger and putting it to my lips. “It’s okay,” he whispered, squeezing my hand as though I were the grieving widow. “This is not your grandfather’s journalism class, where you have to be ‘objective’ about a tragedy. You showed that you feel things. And that really works.”
“Oh, uh, okay,” I said, trying nonchalantly to extract my hand from his grip so I could shoo away the specter of Professor Jordan sitting on my shoulder. Journalists are conduits of information. A good reporter never lets her own emotions get in the way of the story. Of course, I’d already taken some liberties on that front. You can’t have a blind taste test of the best peach ice cream and be objective. Okay, Professor Jordan?
“The news is terrible and people want to know you feel that. I mean, you’re in their bedrooms every morning and at their dinner table every night. It’s okay for them to feel your sadness. Aren’t we all sad about the news?” He looked at me with moist eyes and I decided not to mention that I found news exciting.
“So,” he said, straightening up and clapping his hands together, “we’ve got our work cut out for us. We’re launching next month. I predict combining our first year with the presidential race will boost the numbers enough to put FAIR News on the map.”
“Sounds smart,” I agreed. “And that reminds me. I saw that photo of you and Victor Fluke out on your wall—”
“Yeah, I love that photo. That’s when I met Fluke. When he did a guest spot on The Impossible Dream! That was one of our highest-rated episodes ever.”
“Yeah?” I said, wanting more. “So what do you think? Do you think he’ll actually run?”
“I don’t think so,” Benji said. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time, but I know the guy doesn’t know shit from Shinola about politics. He loved being a TV star. I think he’s pretending he might run, to get back in the limelight. And it’s working. He’s getting some press. But no, I don’t think he’ll really do it. He likes his beach house in Malibu and his sports car too much. I don’t see him going to the Iowa State Fair and eating deep-fried butter, or whatever the hell they eat there.” At that Benji cringed, like no amount of kale would unclog that thought. “But listen, back to us. A TV start-up is not for the faint of heart! This job will take stamina. And I get the impression you don’t let anything stop you. Hey,” he said, locking onto my eyes, “did you really go on the air without pants?”
I stiffened. “Okay, now see, I can explain—”
“Not necessary,” he interrupted. “It’s fantastic! I did some checking. You had about two thousand Twitter followers before that. You know how many you have now?”
I didn’t. Ever since the pantsless photos went viral I’d taken a Twitter vacation.
“You have 5,138! That’s the power of what can happen overnight when you put something out there that people are interested in.” Benji laughed, and I attempted a laugh, too, though I couldn’t tell if he was kidding.
“So whaddya say?” Benji boomed. “Do you want to be part of this experiment in radical fairness? Do you want to be on the front lines of this bold plan to bring the country together?”
I liked what Benji was saying about uniting the country, of course, though I had no earthly idea how he planned to do it. Mostly, I just couldn’t stop thinking about the six-figure salary that was coming my way, not to mention the clothing allowance. Money talks, and I liked what this salary was saying about paying my rent and helping Mom out, too. So, like every tough assignment I’d ever been given, I figured I’d work out the details later—the old “we’ll fix it in the edit room” strategy that so many of us in TV news relied on when a script wasn’t quite perfect, but the clock was ticking.
“Yes,” I said, slapping my palms on my knees.
“That’s terrific!” Benji said, clapping his hands together. “I’ll call your agent today and make an offer. It’s time for you to experience a Big Benji Diggs Production. Let’s get you out of that Newschann
el 13 hellhole. Jesus, their set looks like something my three-year-old glued together in preschool. Hey, let me show you a picture!” Benji reached to grab a sleek silver frame off the coffee table. His toddler, I assumed.
“You have two children, right?” I said, trying to show interest in what I was discovering was a major point of fascination to Benji Diggs: himself.
“Four, actually,” he said, handing me another photo in another frame of four adorably dressed kids. “A seventeen-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old.”
“How’d that happen?” I asked, immediately hearing how inappropriate it was to inquire about Benji Diggs’s family planning process.
“Different wives,” he said. “I married the first one right out of college, then got divorced. It was sad, she’s a great lady. We were just too young. Anyway, I married my current wife and had these two little beauties. God, having kids is sooo amazing!” he said, staring at his own family’s photo. “Do you have any kids?”
“Nope,” I said, thinking that was a weird question. He must know that the rigors of field reporting made having a baby impossible for a single twenty-nine-year-old. But someday . . . if this FAIR News thing worked out . . . and I could work my way up to anchoring . . . and spend more time with Charlie . . . and get married . . . I almost didn’t want to let myself dream that far ahead.
“Oh, you’ve got to do it. I mean, it’s such a life changer. I love it. And I’m gonna keep doing it until I get a boy,” he said, turning to place the frames back on the table. “I was very close to my mother growing up, still am.” Benji stopped and I could have sworn his throat caught. He looked at me with soupy eyes. “I wish that for you. There’s nothing like it. And how great would it be to have girls and boys?”
Amanda Wakes Up Page 4