School started. We run a two-minute package on back-to-school tips for families and tie that in with a story about a local charity that feeds hungry children on the weekends. I stack the show so that our sports reporter can kill time talking about football season. The whole Sonny Boykin story comes and goes, depending on whether more compelling news surfaces on any particular day. Since not much is happening around town, we’re digging up the dregs of that story; we know it can pay the bills. People love scandal.
Meghan finds me at my desk. “Justin found some old photos of Ms. Ronan on Facebook. We’re running some of them at six.”
“Any pictures of her with the judge?”
“Yeah, at some law event. The rest are random party pics and a few of her at the beach.”
I click on the shared office file labeled “Sexting Sonny Boykin.” In one shot, they’re at a cocktail party. She’s petite; standing next to Judge Boykin, she looks even smaller. She wears a maroon dress, black stilettoes. The judge is in a gray business suit. His arm is around her waist. They both smile.
In another photo, she wears a bikini, her breasts sugarcoated with sand. She’s on Sullivan’s Island—I can tell from the lighthouse in the background. The last is a selfie taken in what looks like a restaurant bathroom. While they’re all normal photos for a twenty-three-year-old, when paired next to a pixelated dick pic, they suggest something seamy. “Do we really need these other photos?”
“Well, Sonny’s accusing her of libel, and she won’t talk to us.”
“Yeah, but I feel these photos suggest that she’s slutty or something, like she might not be totally believable.”
“Well, Sonny could be innocent. Two sides to every story.”
“What does Angela say?”
“She took the day off to be with Cooper.”
“Oh.”
* * *
Before my seven-o’clock show goes live, I sneak into an editing suite to tweak the lead story. South Carolina is a Bible Belt state; we know many of our viewers attend church, where versions of male power and female submission are preached and ratified every Sunday. Many of our viewers will be predisposed to doubt Ms. Ronan’s innocence just because she is a woman.
Not on my watch. I pull the video of the story, which will run beneath the anchor speaking live, from the shared office files and drag it into the desktop trash. I scan through my show’s video-editing files and load the original back into the editing software. With a quick click and drag, I remove the solo images of Ms. Ronan at the beach and in a bathroom. I leave the photo of Judge Boykin and Ms. Ronan together in the package, stretching its time on screen to nearly twelve seconds. Normally, an image stays up for three seconds, five tops, so anyone who knows video editing would see this as sloppy, but I don’t care. Ms. Ronan could be lying, but why would any woman want her personal life pried open like an oyster at a Lowcounty roast?
For good measure, I add a story about Wildcat Acres, the proposed six-thousand-home development on a floodplain. The latest is that the city’s planning director moved forward with the infill proposal approved by DHEC.
The lead developer is a Charleston local, the son of the owner of the Coast Company. I recognize both men as members of Battery Hall. But who is the planning director? My search pulls up the image of a handsome blond man in his fifties with his hair brushed back into a sort of modest pompadour. Charles Boone. That could certainly be the name of a local, but I don’t recognize him. And if he were a member of Battery Hall, he certainly wouldn’t advertise it on his bio. Whoever he is, he should know that the lead cause of flooding in that area will be the fill dirt. Will the federal government bailout these new homebuyers, too? What a mess.
While I’m at it, I toss in the plight of Gadsden Creek, a tiny finger of water reaching into the peninsula off the city’s west edge. Developers plan to fill this wetland and are getting the city to use tax dollars to help them do it. The last time I pitched this story idea, Angela said that maybe ten people care about a shallow tidal creek next to a poor Black community; the story would waste airtime. News is still a business—I get it. But this one time won’t hurt.