Hard News

the significance?”
    “But what difference does popularity make? If he’s innocent he’s innocent.”
    “Are you as naive as you seem to be?”
    “Peter Pan’s
my favorite play.”
    Maisel smiled. “Maybe it
is
better to have balls than brains.” Rune smelled sweet-sour whisky on his breath. Yes, Maisel certainly fit the mold of an old-time journalist.
    “Why don’t you find a
nice
criminal who’s been wrongly imprisoned and get him out of jail. Why do you have to crusade for an asshole?”
    Rune said, “Innocent assholes shouldn’t be in jail any more than innocent saints.”
    Which earned an outright laugh. Rune could tell he didn’t want to smile but he did. He looked at her for a minute. “Piper called me and said there was a, well, an eager young thing from the local station who—”
    Rune asked, “Is that how she described me? Eager?”
    Maisel dug into his pipe with a silver tool that looked like a large flattened nail. “Not exactly. But let’s let it go at that. And when she told me that, I thought, Oh, boy, another one. Eager, obnoxious, ambitious. But she won’t have grit.”
    “I have grit.”
    Maisel said, “I think you may. And I have to tell you—even though I think he’s guilty the Boggs case went a little too smoothly. Too fast.”
    “Did the media hang him out to dry before the trial?” Rune asked.
    Maisel leaned back. “The media hangs
all
defendants out to dry before the trial. That’s a constant. No, I’m just speaking of the cops and the court system…. I think this may be—
may
be—a story worth telling. If you do it right.”
    “I can do it. I really can.”
    “Piper said you’re a cameraman. You have any other experience?”
    “I did a documentary. It was on PBS.”
    “Public Broadcasting?” he asked derisively. “Well,
Current Events
is a hell of a lot different from PBS. It costs over a half-million dollars a week to produce. We don’t get grants; we survive because of advertising revenue geared to our Nielsen and Arbitron. We
earn
our way. Last week we had ten-point-seven rating points. You know what a point represents?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Each point means that nine hundred and twenty-one thousand homes are watching us.”
    “Awesome,” Rune said, losing the math, but thinking that a lot of people were going to see her program.
    “We’re fighting against some of the biggest-drawing shows in the history of television. This season we’re up against
Next Door Neighbors
and
Border Patrol.”
    Rune nodded, looking impressed, even though she’d only seen one episode of
Neighbors
—the season’s big hit sitcom—and thought it was the stupidest thing on TV, full of wisecracking and mugging for the camera and idiotic one-liners.
Border Patrol
had great visuals and a super sound track, though all that ever happened was that the cute young agent and the older, wiser agent argued about departmental procedures, then saved each other’s ass on alternate weeks while administering large doses of political correctness to the audience.
    Current Events
, on the other hand, she watched all the time.
    Maisel continued. “We’ve got four twelve-minute segments each week, surrounded by millions of dollars of commercials. You don’t have time to be leisurely. You don’t have time to develop subjects and give the audience mood shots. You’ll shoot ten thousand feet of tape and use five hundred. We’re classy. We’ve got computer graphics coming out of our ears. We paid ninety thousand dollars for synthesized theme music by this hotshot New Age musician. This is the big time. Our stories aren’t about sex-change operations, dolphins saving fishermen’s lives, three-year-old crack dealers. We report
news
. It’s a magazine, the way the old
Life
and
Look
were magazines. Remember that.”
    Rune nodded.
    “Magazine,” Maisel continued, “as in pictures. I’ll want lots of visuals—tape of the original crime scene, old footage, new interviews.”
    Rune sat forward. “Oh, yeah, and how about claustrophobic prison scenes? You know, small green rooms and bars? Maybe the rooms where they hose down prisoners? Before-and-after pictures of Boggs—to see how thin and pale he’s gotten.”
    “Good. I like that.” Maisel looked at a slip of paper. “Piper said you’re with the local station. I’ll have you assigned to me.”
    “You mean I’ll be on staff? Of
Current Events?”
Her pulse picked up exponentially.
    “Temporarily.”
    “That’s