Nice Girls Finish Last by Sparkle Hayter Page A

nodded.
    â€œSeriously.”
    â€œI’m taking you seriously.”
    I had planned to complain to McGravy about the sensational, gratuitous, and spurious story Jerry was making me do, but this didn’t seem a propitious time to whine.
    â€œBob, am I going to be affected in the reshuffle?” I asked. “Is that why I have to be on my best behavior?”
    â€œI can’t tell you that, Robin,” he said. “You know I can’t.”
    â€œI am going to be affected, aren’t I?”
    â€œI can’t tell you.”
    â€œPlease don’t let them send me to Nutrition News, Bob. Or take me off the air.”
    â€œRobin, I can’t discuss the content of our editorial meetings. Don’t ask me again,” he said. “So how’s life with Jerry? Are you behaving yourself?”
    â€œI’m trying to behave myself, but Jerry gets worse every day. He goes out of his way to provoke me—”
    â€œYeah. But the guy knows how to get ratings, that’s for sure.”
    McGravy said this with a kind of grudging respect for ratings I’d never seen in him before. If anything, he had always disdained ratings, and felt that the network’s mandate was the story first. For years, he had waged a one-man crusade against the tabloidization of broadcast news, a Sisyphean mission in the age of Amy, Tonya, and O.J. Although ANN was not nearly as tainted as some of the networks, it had fed at the trough too often and too noisily for McGravy’s tastes.
    Special Reports was always the first hog at the trough. Yet, despite that, Jerry’s star was rising at ANN. While the rest of the network struggled for ratings and ad revenue, Special Reports was effortlessly generating huge piles of money for our fearless leader, Georgia Jack Jackson, who greatly appreciated this moneymaking. Jackson was fighting off a slow, persistent takeover attempt by televangelist Paul Mangecet and needed all the cash he could raise. The pressure was on.
    â€œIt makes you wonder what we’ll do for ratings,” McGravy said. “How much is the media unconsciously manipulating events in order to get the best possible story? How are we influencing the outcome in order to grab viewers? To what depths will we lower ourselves to ensure our economic survival?”
    I took that last rhetorical question rather personally, as I had done some pretty sleazy stories for Jerry and so knew a little about the depths to which one might stoop.
    â€œThis is me you’re talking to, Bob,” I said. “The woman who once posed as a sperm-bank customer. The woman who broke the exploding cheek-implant story. Who kept a straight face when a timid church secretary from Kansas told me she’d been gang-banged by aliens who got her drunk aboard their spaceship.”
    Things are apparently pretty much the same all over the universe.
    â€œI know you didn’t want to do those stories. I wasn’t passing judgment on you.”
    Wearily, Bob sighed and punched me lightly in the shoulder. He had bigger problems on his mind.
    â€œAre you learning to roll with the punches a little bit, Robin?”
    â€œI’m being a very good girl,” I said. “Thanks for the Cab Calloway tape, by the way.”
    â€œIt’s a real pick-me-up in the morning, isn’t it? ‘Jumpin’ Jive, makes you nine foot tall when you’re four-foot-five,’” he sang. He emptied his glass. “Always cheers me up. I gotta go, Robin. Just remember, whatever happens, it could be a blessing in disguise.”
    â€œWait! What does that mean? Is that some sort of … warning?”
    â€œRobin, nothing’s set in stone yet. Just remember, a blessing in disguise.”
    Inspirational saying number 246: It’s a blessing in disguise.
    Naturally, this worried me. If it was already a done deal and they just weren’t ready to tell me yet, then I wanted to know in time to, as Tamayo