HIDDEN AGENDA

Television correspondent Jonelle Patterson is hired by start-up channel Network ONE as its top assignment reporter, but her life is in danger when she realizes the sensational events she is covering are occurring to boost her career and the network's ratings

Annoying, manipulative tale of annoying, manipulative media moguls who lie, cheat, steal, and murder to further the career of their trusting, naive star TV reporter. This third novel from Racina (Snow Angel, 1996, etc.) decries the trashy sensationalism and dumbing-down of TV news by offering generous helpings of what the author presumably despises, on pages spattered with names of the rich, famous, or merely good-looking. Beautiful, competent CNN twinkie Jonelle Patterson is selected from the ranks of budding TV talking heads by the oafish trio of sleazy suits that runs the fledgling all-news Network ONE cable channel. A mother of two, married to a dashing airline pilot (who's also a whiz at editing videotape) and a devoutly fundamentalist Christian (her father-in-law is a professor at Pat Robertson's Regent University), Jonelle is to be groomed as the ``domestic Christiane Amanpour'' by Barney Keller, her balding, vulgarian Yiddish-slinging boss. Keller, with his cronies on the Christian Right and his Republican friends, steer Jonelle toward one high- profile assignment after another, during which grotesquely violent accidents, inexplicable deaths, and outright murders occur just as she unpacks her microphone. Jonelle's witless eyewitness accounts of so many fortuitous disasters effortlessly boost the ratings of her one-woman newsmagazine, but it takes the artful videotape manipulation of perfect husband Steve to discover that, lurking in the background of every scene she covers, is a man with a gold ring on his hand. After about 150 pages of such nonsense, the Pattersons learn that these murders are part of a conspiracy, orchestrated by the GOP and the Christian Right, to transform Jonelle into a God-fearing presidential candidate for the 2008 election. Finally, after twice saving the life of Hillary Clinton, Steve and Jonelle have to race against probability and healthy skepticism to take their story to competing networks. Painfully bad. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Broadcast journalist Jonelle Patterson is wooed by a huge salary to Network ONE, a start-up TV channel backed by the Christian Right. Here she is promised free reign to travel the world covering sensational stories. Her husband suspects that her timing, luck, and personal involvement in these stories is more than mere kismet, and Jonelle reluctantly agrees. Is she being used by the Christian Right? Is the news being "created" for her to report? Racina (Snow Angel, LJ 6/15/96), a former TV scriptwriter, offers a timely story filled with recognizable people from our own political arena, but the conspiracy is revealed too early, diluting the suspense. The negative treatment of the extreme Christian Right may thrill some patrons while offending others, and the characters, family situations, and plot line should make a predictable TV movie of the week. Large fiction collections may want to consider.?Terrill Persky, Woodridge P.L., Ill.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.