Music: “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” by Denise Williams from the Footloose soundtrack
The plan was simple.
The top story was about a hospital board meeting. Follow me so far? The management had talked about adding room service at the county hospital and talked about how emergency room visits were up this week, largely due to an upswing in flu and cold cases. Still with me? In this story package, along with malpractice insurance concerns and a discussion about hiring more physicians I wanted to include a giant picture of Dick Cheney.
Okay. I wager I lost you there, as I did my boss when this idea was initially explained, but I wager you my logic will be more easily seen when I give you a little more context.
The reporter gleefully told me he had uncovered a Vice Presidential conspiracy.
A new doctor that had been hired had recently come from Texas… as in Corpus Christi.
You need more context? That’s not a problem.
He was in charge of the emergency room where Harry Whittington, the now famous 78-year-old lawyer and Cheney hunting partner was brought in for treatment after their under-reported accident (though you may have heard an inkling about it on the news).
The reporter said it all made sense. Cheney, who is from Wyoming, has a lot of connections (one is tempted to make a Haliburton joke, but I’ve lived here long enough to know it isn’t a joke. I pass two or three Haliburton trucks just on my one-mile walk to work. The company was one of the major financial sponsors of the local ice skating rink. Without any hyperbole or irony, let’s just say Haliburton is big around here… well, maybe a little irony). As a favor for saving his friends life, the reporter continued, it is logically that he would arrange a nice Wyoming job package as a sign of appreciation and esteem.
Well you know we need to include a Cheney mug in this package, I agreed. We even had one left over from when Cheney visited the Wyoming Legislature a couple weeks back.
It was such an obvious and easy idea to implement.
Of course, the night editor didn’t especially see it our way. We didn’t really expect her to – we initially had told her of our plan to stick a Cheney picture in with the hospital story without any of the accompanying context that explained the madness of the method.
We weren’t serious about following through with this revelation, at least I’m fairly sure we weren’t. I know I wasn’t, and I’m willing to bet the reporter was joking as well.
Still, with all the near rabid coverage we had of the issue only a few days ago (overshadowing such stories as the steady breakdown of the Iran nuclear talks and Hamas solidifying their control of the elected Palestinian government), including Cheney’s face with a hospital story about a new emergency room doctor doesn’t seem that big of a stretch.
And it even leaves two degrees left over to connect it all to Kevin Bacon.
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What's to explain? Dick Cheney and emergency rooms go together quite naturally.
Caleb Michael said...
Keith, you're a lot closer to the truth than you may think. Look for the rest of the post Saturday.