Warrior Pose by Brad Willis Page A

wanted me, they said, because the show needed someone who had been a news director to provide more organization, focus, and leadership than the previous producer. But it meant, they added, that I would no longer be a reporter. I told myself I didn’t care. It was a huge jump up in market size, incredible pay, and the only offer on the table. What a mistake it turned out to be.
    I gave the show everything I had, always trying to minimize the fluff and inject the investigative journalism I loved. But I was trying to turn a lamb into a lion. The longtime cohosts wanted to keep it soft and light. The reporters only wanted to make the hosts happy. For me, it was like overdosing on candy and I could barely bring myself to even watch Weeknight . I argued, sweet-talked, and bullied the staff, trying to make the tone more substantial and journalistic. It was all to no avail. After less than a year it was clear to me, and everyone else, that this job was not for me. When Pete Langlois called me into his office one afternoon, I figured I was about to be fired.
    â€œI don’t think you belong with Weeknight ,” he said when I’d barely sat down.
    â€œI know I don’t,” I answered with a huge sigh, feeling equal jolts of abject fear and complete relief. “I’m not happy. The staff isn’t happy. This isn’t what I was meant to do.”
    I confessed to Langlois that it was painfully obvious to me that I was wired to do hard-hitting, investigative news reporting. That’s what had come so naturally to me in my first TV job. My passion for the news is what had made me so successful in Eureka.
    â€œI agree with you,” Langlois said, sounding as detached as ever. Here it comes , I thought, the end of my career . Instead, he said, “I want you take over our Call Three. Bring your intense focus and energy to that and there will be no stopping you.”
    I was stunned, elated, and profoundly relieved. Call Three was an institution at KCRA’s Eyewitness News, dedicated to seeking justice for consumers who’d been wronged. Staffed by a group of highlyskilled community volunteers, it handled thousands of consumer complaints every month that poured in by phone and mail. Call Three would document their cases, determine the validity of their complaints, and then become their advocate with the merchants or businesses in question. KCRA’s designated Call Three reporter would then comb through the resolved cases and pick the best success stories to report on twice a week. The reporter who had handled Call Three for several years had just been hired as a news anchor in another city, and now the segment would be mine.
    â€œI’ll take it, Pete,” I said so loudly I thought the whole newsroom might hear me. The producer under me at Weeknight took over my duties as executive producer, and soon I was off and running with my new gig.
    Once I became familiar with the Call Three staff and procedures, I immediately conspired to make it something unique and more substantive. Call Three helped consumers with things like getting shoddy repairs fixed or a refund for a faulty product. The reports would focus on how happy the consumers were that Call Three helped them resolve their complaints. I chose to focus instead on exposing the consumer fraud and went after the perpetrators with my cameras. Once I began peeling back the veils, what seemed like small cases at first often became big stories.
    One viewer contacted Call Three to complain that he had been denied medical coverage for his one-year-old daughter who was dying of cancer. Digging into it, we uncovered a billion-dollar construction firm falsifying its payroll records on government-funded housing projects across the country, paying the workers less than half of what it billed the Department of Housing and Urban Development for their labor. This way, the corporation, whose president had close ties with the Republican Party, could skim