The Good News Hour - Mohammed Hassan (short story)

Mohammed Hassan

The Good News Hour

By Mohammed Hassan It was a healthy form of chaos and I was right in the center of it.

People running back and forth, exchanging profanity-laced instructions. Masses huddled over screens, pushing buttons and readying the cameras. Presenters reciting their lines to themselves while makeup artists embellish the radiance of their cheeks. There I was, backstage at IDK Network headquarters. We were minutes away from witnessing the historic launch of GINO, the world’s first happynews-only television channel.

The build-up in the prior months had been immense. It was billed as a revolution in media and journalism, with content that would flip the script on what has been considered news-worthy for centuries. GINO was going to do what no news organization has ever done: glorify the mundaneness of life. It was a 24-hour news channel dedicated solely to the coverage of successful births, birthday parties, happy anniversaries, work promotions, warm family gatherings, good school report cards, fun-filled weekend hangouts, pleasant encounters with neighbors, ceremonies of profiles high and low, and all kinds of everyday pleasantness. There would be no mention of deaths, wars, crimes, politics, economies, scandals, or anything salacious and sad.

The bulk of the reporting would be dominated by heart-felt moments of closeness between people. If your baby laughs its first laugh, GINO will be there to report – and celebrate – it with you. If a work meeting goes better than expected, GINO will be there to uncover the wonderful details. The norm was about to become news.

GINO unarguably had a studio that matched its programming spirit.

The furniture had only vivid, bright colors. Even the coffee mugs had vibrant colors. There were kittens and puppies scattered in various rooms within the building for instant doses of stress relief. And of course, the presenters on the set in front of me didn’t wear suits. The male presenter wore a casual shirt and his female counterpart wore a floral dress (I couldn’t tell you what they were wearing below the waist as they’ve been seated behind a large view-obstructing desk the whole time I was there). They were reciting their lines through forced smiles, having just learned minutes ago that their show had been relegated and will now be the second program to air today. They had

The Good News Hour no choice but to endure the waiting and watch as another program claims the historic debut status.

The inaugural program started on a high note. It was a recorded remote segment titled ‘Smiles All Around’, hosted by Mil Reaner.

The premise of the episodes would be Mr. Reaner visiting different families in their neighborhoods and asking them if they had any good news to share. This episode focused on the Paltom family, whose 8month old baby, Labe, had just uttered her first word. Unlike what was expected, we didn’t just get a quick news update about it. It was an in-depth report, with each family member receiving a separate interview. There were no filler questions (from the GINO perspective, at least). Only questions that made viewers relate to the ordinariness of this family. The father, Sko Paltom, works as a mid-level machinist in a bio-printing facility. The mother, Virdanne, runs a successful neighborhood toy store with plans of expansion. They have two children older than Labe, both boys, named Jut and Fuje. They can often be seen dining at le plat fabuleux or playing catch with their dog, Emgh, at Wamo Park. Information like this was the skeleton of GINO’s program lineup. The happy news was the external flesh that the skeleton supported.

No one could tell for sure what the word was that Labe mumbled.

Candidates included “young”, “yum”, “one”, and even “tummy”.

Reaner, having seen the recording of the momentous occasion, chimed in by suggesting that it was an attempt at saying “sunny”, as the baby was looking at a window with the sun seeping in when she uttered the word. He followed this up by saying that they might have a little genius on their hands. By the time the half-hour program was over, we had become so familiar with the Paltom family that it was as if they have always been a big part of our lives. Mil asked just the right questions to spark an emotional connection from the viewer. It was clear to see why it was bumped to be the first in GINO’s lineup.

The next program, however, was going to be the star of the lineup. It was the one that the presenters in front of me had been preparing for, and the cause of the commotion in the studio. A live, 60-minute news segment titled ‘The Good News Hour’. It would consist of rapid-fire good news delivered by the two hosts with the aid of various onlocation reporters. The show would employ what the network has termed ‘ASAP coverage’ to fill the on-screen ticker as it scrolls by

Mohammed Hassan with infinite updates. The updates were short but impactful. ‘So-andso baby had just been born, healthy’, ‘so-and-so student just received full marks on surprise test’, ‘So-and-so family enjoys best picnic yet’.

Only one minute into the show and the ticker had already seen at least 50 updates.

This was it. This was the channel’s vision in its purest state. It was the type of show that is so organic to the objective of GINO, that it was rumored to be the main reason the channel came to life – the rest of the programming was built around it later. Even on paper, it seemed like this was the right choice for the channel’s debut program, so everyone was baffled at first as to why it had been dropped to the second slot. But having seen Smiles All Around, I can now appreciate the difficulty that the network had before making its choice.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised that the network was prone to such last-minute decisions. It seemed to be in character of its fiery and confrontational Chairman, Stil Stellaney, who, when asked by reporters why anyone would watch news that’s not really news, famously replied: “Because in harder times, people need harder drugs”. GINO was his attempt at destroying all bridges to reality. He wanted to keep us submerged in an eternal state of denial, to forever get high on the fumes of a fleeting moment where a trying child received a warm pat on the shoulder from an approving parent. These moments are fleeting by nature, but to Stellaney, that doesn’t mean you can’t report on them – even if it was for just a second on a scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen.

As the ticker kept scrolling, the hosts went slightly in-depth on select stories. They first cut to a reporter who was sitting with a group of young boys playing with a ball inside their house. He asked them what they like the most about playing with each other, received a couple of endearing responses told through awkward smiles, then sent us back to the studio hosts. They told us how sweet the boys were and then sent us to another reporter who was wearing a party hat and eating cake inside an office. She quickly told us that the office was celebrating the birthday of one of their coworkers before joining them in singing ‘happy birthday to you’ and sending us back to the studio again. This string of back-and-forth flash reports continued for about three or so minutes that were jampacked with grandmothers being appreciated, meals being complimented, people being congratulated

The Good News Hour for having an entirely good day, and even some updates about previous reports from the first and second minutes. I couldn’t even recall all of them. There must have been dozens of wonderful, cheerful, good news.

It was around the fourth minute mark of the program. That’s when it happened. I felt uneasy. Nausea started to set in. There was a clinch in the center of my stomach. I felt as if a hand had formed inside my body and wrapped its fingers around my intestines, squeezing with no mercy in sight. The studio hosts sent us to one of their reporters as per usual. He looked slightly younger than the others. He was standing in a hospital room, announcing that a beautiful heathy baby girl had just been born. The camera focused on the baby, who was indeed beautiful and healthy. She wasn’t crying at all. She looked almost as if she was smiling. But then the camera zoomed back to a wider shot of the hospital room, and that’s when we saw them. The parents of the happy baby were right behind the reporter, who was too preoccupied with the baby to notice them. The mother was lying on the bed and the father was standing next to her. They weren’t happy. They weren’t even smiling. In fact, they looked outright miserable. Their eyes were puffy and encircled in black. Their lips looked as if they had been sealed since the day they were born. Their stained clothes were loosefitting, a clear result of malnourishment. This was a family that had been ruined by years of war and made no effort in hiding it. They didn’t seem thrilled about bringing a baby into their world.

The reporter immediately realized what was happening and awkwardly cut back to the studio hosts, who took a second before they composed themselves and pushed through with more smiles as they carried on with their announcements. But it didn’t matter. The damage was done. This was clearly a fumble on GINO’s part, and it was a fumble that could bring them to the ground where they are likely to stay. That family should have never ended up in front of their camera. I can only imagine what kind of response erupted from Stellaney, assuming he was watching that as well (of course, he was).

Ironically, GINO itself had barely finished its first hour of good news before Good News Hour proved that this was not a sustainable model for a channel. Having nothing but happy news did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. Instead of distracting us from our misery, it emphasized it by putting every minutia of happiness under a

Mohammed Hassan microscope. Now, whenever we were spoiled with delight, the smallest inconvenience would cause us to be extremely upset. The smaller the inconvenience, the bigger the discontent. Because now we’re all thinking: “everything would have been perfect if it wasn’t for that one tiny thing. Why can’t everything just be perfect so we’d be truly happy?”

Now that I think of it, the same issues were abundant in Smiles All Around, but for some reason, we never noticed it. When Mil Reaner was driving around the neighborhood, he wasn’t looking for a family that wanted to share good news. He was looking for a family that was still capable of having good news. He had passed by a lot of rubble in his path before ultimately settling on the Paltoms’ residence. Much of the rubble used to be their neighbors’ houses. Much of the neighborhood used to have neighbors. That was many, many years ago. Perhaps we were so preoccupied with the newness of it all that we simply chose to view the rubble as rubble, and not as what it used to be. But that was just the first nuisance. It was mentioned that Sko worked as a machinist, but it wasn’t mentioned that scores of upperclass citizens had to get jobs as lower level machinists to survive the job drought during the first five years of the Slow War. The same with Virdanne. It was mentioned that she owns a toy store, but it was not mentioned that toy stores had been springing around the country because the Fourth Interim Government uses them as a front for manufacturing weapons. That ‘plans for expansion’ remark could have been some veiled threat against the Fifth Interim Government.

She may well be an agent on the government’s payroll for all we know. How else can she and her machinist husband afford dining at a fancy place like le plat fabuleux? And it’s only now that I realize the incident with the unhappy family may not have been a result of naivety, but rather one of ambitious reporting. With all the GINO reporters out there snatching every bit of good news in the nearby neighborhoods, there must have been nothing left by the time that reporter had arrived. He had no choice but to go further away into the poorer neighborhoods to find what could pass as reasonably good news. Unfortunately for him, there’s no such thing in GINO’s vocabulary as ‘reasonably good news’.

It was all coming back to me now. The Slow War, the Short War, and the Bleed have taken a heavy toll on many of us. They have cost us

The Good News Hour our loved ones, our neighbors, and our neighborhoods. But we have been in a state of war for so long that we have assimilated it into our state of living. Even when were inside the studio, we could hear the rockets going back and forth, and we could feel their vibrations all around us. We paid it no mind at the time because we had become numb to it. It was what you would expect on a weekend (for many, many weekends now). We assimilated it into our hearing and our bodies. This was all standard procedure to us. That is, until GINO came along and jolted us with that horrific image of the unhappy family. Everything could have been perfect if it wasn’t for that one damn channel. Can’t we ever just be happy?

I could not stomach being in that studio any longer. I immediately left unnoticed amid the shouting and finger-pointing. Covering the launch had been a bad experience for me, but I presume it was even more miserable for the people who work there. They had many more programs to endure for the day. Hopefully, the channel folds quickly after today’s blunder and their suffering comes to a swift end. At least, they can take comfort knowing that there’s always machinist jobs to be filled.

As GINO’s armed personnel escorted me back to my assigned transportation pod, I was thinking how this day had been a waste of my allocated outing tokens. I’m down to only three tokens for the year now, and I will have to choose carefully which stories are deemed worthy of me going into the outside world. It won’t be easy distributing those over the remaining six months, especially with no shortage of war updates in sight. But it’s not all bad, I guess. At least now I’m here, finally back in the comfort of my steel-clad underground bunker. I can relax knowing that I’ll be spending the rest of the day sitting in front of the news screen, digging into a box of year-long sterilized edibles. The giant headline reads: ‘TODAY’S TOLL: 651 dead from rocket blasts, 73 from food attacks, 20 from traitor brandings, 2 from political reform assassinations’. I can’t wait to see what follows the daily death report. I hope it’s an economy crashing, or a residential area evacuated for being too polluted. I could use some reasonably bad news right now.

END