Stalking Susan Read Online Free
Author: Julie Kramer
familiar with it, like almost every journalist in the country.
No surprise the box existed. After all, the story had won nearly every award in broadcast news from Peabody to Emmy to Murrow. Big-bucks political consultants were using it as a textbook case to teach their clients how not to act in front of TV cameras.
As I pulled the box from the shelf I knew that, for me, it was Pandora’s box.
R AW TAPE CAN trigger raw emotions. Top-notch TV news producers know this. They use that power to move viewers to tears. I had been in the business long enough to know that if I put that firebombing tape in a video viewing machine, thirty seconds later I just might be the one reaching for a tissue, bawling my eyes out.
I carried the box down the hall to a closet-sized room and shut the door. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t late at night and the newsroom wasn’t empty, except for a college student hired to listen to the police scanners and dispatch a sleepy photographer at the first sign of spot news. Inside the box I found a dozen videotapes. I was interested only in one.
I put it in the viewing deck and hit
play
. The tape began to roll.
The camera is on Minnesota governor Rocky Johnson. Voters love Governor Johnson almost as much as the camera does. He’s a large man with thick wavy hair and a professional smile. But he’s not just a pretty political face: his background made him electable and his charm appears to be the ticket to making him reelectable.
Governor Johnson didn’t avoid Vietnam like some politicians. He trained as a Green Beret, though he’s fuzzy on whether or not he actually saw combat. The media has pretty much had to take his word for it, because a 1973 fire at an army storage center in St. Louis, Missouri, destroyed rooms of military records, including his.
The election is a few months away. On the tape he exudes the confidence of an incumbent and front-runner. The previous week’s poll put him fifteen points ahead of his challenger, Lester Muller, a family farmer from southern Minnesota with character but no charisma. So far his campaign slogan, Les Is More, had earned him less support and more ridicule.
Free publicity is on Governor Johnson’s itinerary today. A Channel 3 camera crew is following him, shooting cover of backslapping and baby kissing for a behind-the-scenes campaign piece. Governor Johnson is touring the newly opened Iron Range Regional Center, which he touts as a “cooperative venture between public and private forces.” The Iron Range covers much of northeastern Minnesota. Since mining went bust, the area’s future is financially bleak. But the Range got a fat government grant for this “building of the future,” and Governor Johnson is here to take credit. It’s a shrewd political move because the Iron Range is the strong arm of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
There’s a saying in state politics: as goes the Iron Range, so goes the election. The Range was the last area in Minnesota to switch from hand-counted ballots to electronic tabulation. Because of that, their returns always came in last. The joke was, the Rangers are still waiting to see how many votes they need.
The Iron Range Regional Center is located outside the small town of Finland, population 603. Rugged and isolated, it’s in one of the last parts of Minnesota to be settled. Immigrants from the old country founded it in the late 1890s and kept the name so they’d never forget their roots. The town’s biggest attraction before the Iron Range Regional Center was a purple and green wooden statue of Saint Urho who, legend has it, chased the grasshoppers out of Finland.
The Center houses a day care center, a senior center, a coffee shop, a barbershop, a bait shop, and a county licensing bureau where folks can get marriage licenses, auto licenses, boat licenses, fishing licenses, and, most important, hunting licenses. In northern Minnesota, every pickup truck has a
No surprise the box existed. After all, the story had won nearly every award in broadcast news from Peabody to Emmy to Murrow. Big-bucks political consultants were using it as a textbook case to teach their clients how not to act in front of TV cameras.
As I pulled the box from the shelf I knew that, for me, it was Pandora’s box.
R AW TAPE CAN trigger raw emotions. Top-notch TV news producers know this. They use that power to move viewers to tears. I had been in the business long enough to know that if I put that firebombing tape in a video viewing machine, thirty seconds later I just might be the one reaching for a tissue, bawling my eyes out.
I carried the box down the hall to a closet-sized room and shut the door. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t late at night and the newsroom wasn’t empty, except for a college student hired to listen to the police scanners and dispatch a sleepy photographer at the first sign of spot news. Inside the box I found a dozen videotapes. I was interested only in one.
I put it in the viewing deck and hit
play
. The tape began to roll.
The camera is on Minnesota governor Rocky Johnson. Voters love Governor Johnson almost as much as the camera does. He’s a large man with thick wavy hair and a professional smile. But he’s not just a pretty political face: his background made him electable and his charm appears to be the ticket to making him reelectable.
Governor Johnson didn’t avoid Vietnam like some politicians. He trained as a Green Beret, though he’s fuzzy on whether or not he actually saw combat. The media has pretty much had to take his word for it, because a 1973 fire at an army storage center in St. Louis, Missouri, destroyed rooms of military records, including his.
The election is a few months away. On the tape he exudes the confidence of an incumbent and front-runner. The previous week’s poll put him fifteen points ahead of his challenger, Lester Muller, a family farmer from southern Minnesota with character but no charisma. So far his campaign slogan, Les Is More, had earned him less support and more ridicule.
Free publicity is on Governor Johnson’s itinerary today. A Channel 3 camera crew is following him, shooting cover of backslapping and baby kissing for a behind-the-scenes campaign piece. Governor Johnson is touring the newly opened Iron Range Regional Center, which he touts as a “cooperative venture between public and private forces.” The Iron Range covers much of northeastern Minnesota. Since mining went bust, the area’s future is financially bleak. But the Range got a fat government grant for this “building of the future,” and Governor Johnson is here to take credit. It’s a shrewd political move because the Iron Range is the strong arm of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
There’s a saying in state politics: as goes the Iron Range, so goes the election. The Range was the last area in Minnesota to switch from hand-counted ballots to electronic tabulation. Because of that, their returns always came in last. The joke was, the Rangers are still waiting to see how many votes they need.
The Iron Range Regional Center is located outside the small town of Finland, population 603. Rugged and isolated, it’s in one of the last parts of Minnesota to be settled. Immigrants from the old country founded it in the late 1890s and kept the name so they’d never forget their roots. The town’s biggest attraction before the Iron Range Regional Center was a purple and green wooden statue of Saint Urho who, legend has it, chased the grasshoppers out of Finland.
The Center houses a day care center, a senior center, a coffee shop, a barbershop, a bait shop, and a county licensing bureau where folks can get marriage licenses, auto licenses, boat licenses, fishing licenses, and, most important, hunting licenses. In northern Minnesota, every pickup truck has a
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