bullshit me kind of look. I glanced at the clock: 7:34.
“Excuse me, my piece is up.” I went to stand next to the executive producer, the EP, which is what we producers did so we could gauge his reaction when our pieces were on. It was the only time to get feedback. The rest of the day, he was too busy planning for tomorrow. There is no such thing as retrospect in morning television. It’s all present tense and tease the future.
“Take camera five! Cue music! Dissolve four.” The director brought us safely out of commercial. “Take three!”
Faith Heide looked up.
“Welcome back to New Day USA,” she said with an engaging smile, which quickly morphed into a furrowed, concerned-citizen look. “Later this hour, is the popular eggshell diet safe? And we’ll talk to the stars of the hot new reality show Who’s Your Mama. But first (pregnant pause), for this week’s edition of our American Ideals series, I met a man whose free-market ingenuity is helping to improve the lives of some women who, until recently, didn’t know what it meant to be free.”
She turned her head to watch the video on the enormous plasma monitor to her left, and then the image went full screen.
I breathed in deeply. I always got a bit of a knot in my stomach when I heard the words I had written come out of an anchor’s mouth. I never knew what they were going to do with them. And Faith, of late, had apparently decided she needed to be taken more seriously. Meaning she was constantly lowering her voice a few octaves and interjecting poignancy with perceptible sighs, trying, I suppose, to sound smarter. You could try to tell her to speak normally, but she wasn’t one for taking direction. Her agent had recently negotiated to get her the largest salary in television history (with a decade-long job guarantee), so she probably felt that she didn’t really need to learn anything new.
“Douglas Purnell might not look like someone who would care much about mascara,” Faith’s narration began. I watched my work in the staccato reflections of light the monitor cast upon my boss’s face. A flicker of emotion from him would be victorious. Call it compassion fatigue, but most television news professionals are intensely jaded. Once, I had produced a piece about a reunion of people who had grown up in a brutal orphanage. But the show was tight on time and something needed to go. “What do you think?” the director had asked the executive producer. The EP had turned to him and said, as if it was the most obvious thing, “Kill the orphans.”
Anyway, the piece I had on that day had nothing to do with orphanages. It was a profile about this guy Doug Purnell who had set up a number of beauty parlors and cosmetics laboratories in Fardish refugee camps at the southern edge of the former Soviet Union, all run by women. We didn’t shoot there, of course. There was no budget for international travel anymore, especially if it meant going to upsetting places where we’d once funded wars. All of the interviews were done stateside, in Purnell’s D.C. office (an organization called Cosmetic Relief) except for a short pickup bit shot by one of the freelance crews the network retained in the region, and there was some amateur DV footage provided by Purnell himself. But it was clear, from the translated sound bites, that these women were immensely grateful to him. He was helping them become self-sufficient while building self-esteem in the process. And the story was as all-American as a network could ask for because a major American cosmetics company had loaned funds and supplies. It was the best story I had done in a while. The most interesting to me, anyway.
People always told me I had the coolest job. I traveled all over the country; I met loads of interesting, colorful people. Celebrities mostly bored me, they were so ubiquitous in my work. So, yes, I would say I had a cool job. But I also had a growing sadness about what I did. It was a feeling of constant loss. I would put in weeks and weeks researching, shooting, writing and editing hours of footage, building relationships with strangers and soothing their fears that they might be portrayed badly, and out of it came about three minutes, four if I was lucky, of a story that most people only half watched because they were chomping on their Cheerios as it played. And then it was gone. There might be an e-mail or two of follow-up, colleagues might say something like “nice piece” when I got back to the office, but that was basically that. The end of it, and on to the next one.
Besides, even if they did put down their Cheerios and watch, they would have no idea that you, the producer, had any hand in it, because someone like Faith would appear in a few shots and have her voice laid in. Some of the correspondents I worked with were more involved than others, and some were really great, but the truth was, in order to show up on the air every day, someone else had to be doing some of the lifting for you. With Faith, “some” really meant “all.”
Sometimes I believed that she believed she had actually done the reporting. And why not? From beauty queen to weather girl to network wonder, Faith Heide always had a presence that caused people to take notice, and a voice that kept their attention. And that, in the end, is probably what matters: the personality of the person asking the questions and telling the tale, not who wrote the actual story. Or, rather, what matters is the viewer’s perception of the personality of the person asking the questions and telling the tale.
I used to question the astronomic salary scales of our on-air talent, but after years in the business, traveling around, talking to our viewers, watching the mercurial dances of the ratings’ shifts, I’m starting to think they deserve those big bucks. Their roles remind me of psychotherapy, with its theories of projection and all of that. It’s morning, the audience is just waking up, and these faces on the screen, these players, are extensions of their dreams—people they know but not really, events they are familiar with but not entirely. It isn’t actually news they are looking for when they turn on the TV; it is more of the same. And because of that, no story, no presentation of a story, can deviate too far from their expectations; it would be too disruptive, too jarring to their psyches. They would change the channel. But instead they had Faith. After all these years of appearing in people’s bedrooms every morning, Faith seemed so familiar and so credible, that, well, she just had to be there. They stayed tuned.
“And for more information about my report, check out our Web site,” she said, smiling. “Ken?”
His turn.
“Nice story, Faith,” he said, as if he actually liked her, and then turned to a new camera angle. “Coming up—long-lasting lipsticks. Are they safe? And later, did she do it? Hollywood vixen Asia Sheraton is here to tell her side of the story. But first, he has been called the vice president’s Prozac, the most trusted man on Pennsylvania Avenue, the brain of the millennium. And he’s only thirty-five. People are saying that senior White House aide and speechwriter Mark Thurber is going to be a central player in Vice President Hacker’s upcoming presidential bid. He’s here with us this morning to give us an insider’s perspective of what some say is the most secretive administration in history, and to discuss his new book, The Scribe Inside: Memoirs of a White House Advisor. Good morning, Mark. So nice to have you here.”
“Good morning to you, Ken. It’s nice to be here.”
Oh my God. “That’s Mark Thurber?” I asked Caitlin, who had come to stand between me and the EP (it was her turn to gauge his take on things). She didn’t answer, though. She didn’t have to.
“Are you enjoying your visit to New York?” said Ken. “It seems we hardly ever see members of the administration outside of D.C. these days.” Cue large, fluorescent white smile.
Thurber laughed and said something about the terror threat being too high to allow high-ranking officials into the pubic eye. “But I’m glad I risked it today. I’ve quite enjoyed meeting some members of your staff,” said the man People magazine had recently named Washington’s Most Eligible Bachelor.
He looked different in person than he did in those airbrushed photos. A little more weathered and more, well, like a lot of guys I know: healthy, a bit on the thin side (I read somewhere that he was a marathon runner), dressed according to the preppy-chic suggestions of the latest J. Crew catalog. Job aside, I wouldn’t say he was all that exceptional. Except look at that smile. Look at those dimples.
My cheeks started to burn. And at that moment, though of course I didn’t know it at the time, the