Chapter Thirty-Three

“SO, Senator McGwire. What, in your opinion, does the President’s speech really mean for our relations with the Manties?”

Thomas Theisman tipped back his chair at the head of the enormous table in the New Octagon conference room as Roland Henneman’s deep-voiced question rolled from the HD mounted above the table.

Henneman had been an employee of the now defunct Office of Public Information for the better part of four standard decades. He’d begun in the usual way, working as a writer, and then as a reporter. Like all reporters in the People’s Republic of Haven, he’d been very careful about what he reported, but he was a handsome man, with a resonant baritone voice and a reassuring manner. As such, he’d soon found his way to a larger and more visible role, and for the last five T-years of the People’s Republic’s existence, he’d hosted a daily talk show on HD here in the capital.

But PubIn had been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the PRH’s citizens. Universally recognized as no more than the Committee of Public Safety’s propaganda mouthpiece, no one had trusted it. It had, in fact, been seen as one of the emblems of the discredited governments of the past, and its elimination had been one of Eloise Pritchart’s first priorities as President. Which meant that, like all of his fellow employees, Henneman had found himself abruptly out of a job.

Fortunately for him, the new administration had disposed of PubIn’s massive holdings in broadcast facilities and equipment at rock bottom prices as a part of its media privatization drive. Although Henneman had been no more than modestly wealthy by the standards of the pre-Committee of Public Safety Legislaturalists, he’d managed to amass sufficient wealth under Rob Pierre to put him in position to organize a bidding cartel. He’d mortgaged himself to the hilt, even taking full advantage of the low-interest loan programs the Pritchart Administration had made available, but he and his colleagues had been able to acquire more than enough of PubIn’s old infrastructure to emerge as a power in the fledgling private broadcast industry.

Henneman’s own visibility during the heady days of PubIn’s monopoly of the airwaves had paid another sort of dividend when it came to finding programming to fill his new network’s broadcast schedule. He continued to host his daily talk show, although the blend of topics it examined had acquired a new, eclectic balance (and a harder edge) that PubIn would never have permitted. In addition, however, he produced, directed, and anchored The Henneman Hour, a political analysis and commentary program which aired every weekend.

In Theisman’s opinion, Henneman remained more of a showman than a brilliant political analyst. But the Secretary of War had to admit that, whatever his shortcomings in that role, Henneman was probably the closest thing to it that the resurrected Republic had so far managed to produce. It never ceased to amuse Theisman when he reflected on the total disappearance of the “analysts” who had once served Public Information. One or two of them had actually found niches as producers on the programs which featured their replacements, but most of them had simply vanished into total obscurity. Not because of any deliberate purge on the part of the new government, but simply because they were supremely unsuited to the new political matrix. Most of them had excelled at delivering the “analysis” which PubIn had wanted delivered. Very few of them had possessed the skill, the tools, or the backbone to dig into questions of public policy and report things the government might not want reported.