I woke in an unfamiliar bed. Then I remembered that I’d spent the night in Halle’s guest room. I felt my pillow move, so I glanced over to see who it was. It was my buddy Bandit. We got up and strolled downstairs to find something to eat.
Last night had turned into a circus at my house once they ran the doctored video. The neighbors weren’t too happy with the news trucks camped out front, so the local police asked if I could make a show of leaving. Fritz organized it, and there was pandemonium when we tried to leave. The police blocked off our street so none of them could follow me. Rita had graciously allowed me to stay at her house until this blew over. I’m sure my neighbors appreciated her help.
Fritz came in as I was finishing my orange juice and tossed me his phone.
“Your phone is off, so Frank called me instead. Here.”
I fielded the phone in midair and held it to my ear.
“What’s the good word?” I asked Frank.
“We kept working overnight because having a coherent response is critical right now. The goal is for reporters to be lazy and just use what we give them. To that end, we’ve put together one-minute, three-minute, and ten-minute all-point rebuttal clips. We’ve also just finished a half-hour infomercial reply we’re putting on your web page. There’s also a roadmap of every point where they edited their material to change your answers.
“Ms. Dixon’s reviewed what we created and is fully on board with everything,” he assured me.
“The coverage was mixed at the start. But as more time has gone by, more and more of the outlets are going with the story we want to tell. That’s the story of a teenager who was targeted by two unscrupulous women with an agenda.
“When the videographer’s mug shot first appeared on the news last night, I was pretty confident the reactions were going to trend our way. Then when the clip of the women talking by the car was aired, I knew we’d turned a corner and things were looking up. A mug shot and a ‘gotcha’ moment is too much for the media to resist. And as soon as one network showed it, the rest of them almost had to go along, or they’d look like fools.
“If the trend continues, the damage will be minimal, and you may come out of this with a higher Q-Rating,” Frank said.
I felt too guarded to breathe a sigh of relief, although I wanted to.
“How’s my social media trending?”
“They’ve blown up. The best part is, we’re tracking the number of hits on the materials we put up yesterday evening, and you already had a ton of downloads of our videos. Like I said, you took some heat early on, but now it’s all looking pretty damn good,” he explained.
“What’s to stop the outlets from taking our video and doing the same hack the two women did?” I asked.
“None of the mainstream outlets have done that, although a couple of hanger-on sensation rags have. It looks like you might actually survive this one,” he said, which was good news, as far as I was concerned.
I felt like I could breathe again.
“All of this makes me feel better.”
“Something that helped was the two clocks. We could do split screens of their footage and ours to show that the footage was from the same interview. But we could also highlight the time differences between the times a question was asked and the times when you said something.
“Your varied responses sealed the deal. It made it easier for us to highlight precisely when you gave an answer, and where they’d edited the video to change your response. It was absolutely clear their editing was a hack-job.
“That’s the main reason we put the raw footage out there. That, along with the edited versions we made to highlight what those two were doing,” Frank reminded me.
I wasn’t sure if he was ever going to take a breath or let me get a word in edgewise.
“What should I do today?” I asked.
“Just keep doing what you did last night. If you stick to the program and everything continues the way it’s going, this should be done by Monday—except for media follow-up, which I’ll handle.
“Tell them that what you actually said, including unedited videos of the full interview, is on your website. Then just shut up and go about your business.”
◊◊◊
As soon as I turned my phone on, it started ringing. I put it on silent and checked messages. I deleted all but the ones from my friends and listened to those. Then I started making calls. The first one was to Pam.
“Oh. My. God!” she started.
She was about to launch into full girl-babble mode, and I didn’t really have time for it.
“Stop!” I commanded.
Unbelievably, she stopped! Hmmm, gotta figure out how I did that.
“David,” she said hesitantly, “can I please tell you some things? They’re important.”
I sighed. This was my baby-mama, after all.
“Sure, Pam, go ahead.”
“I’ve talked to Tracy, Zoe, Brook, and a bunch of others, both guys and girls. We’ve been going through the material on your website, and we want you to know we support you. If you need anything, anything at all, let us know.”
