Spotlight: Just the Truth by Gen LaGreca
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A newswoman battles powerful institutions, economic temptations, and social backlash to keep her commitment to the truth in a crumbling “free press.”
100 years after women were granted the right to vote and in the era of “fake news,” author Gen LaGreca has written a relevant political thriller, Just the Truth, about a woman with unwavering integrity fighting against the overpowering institutional and economic pressures compromising journalism, as she uncovers suspicious circumstances that just might manipulate an upcoming election.
In Just the Truth, the businesses of Laura’s family-run corporation, Taninger Enterprises, are the subject of covert political retribution by public officials who abuse their power and the public trust by targeting political enemies. The Taninger family faces pressure to discourage Laura from investigating the president and his administration. Will the family members be pragmatic, try to avoid controversy, and cover up a huge scandal, or will they defend Laura? How can businesspersons and private citizens stand up to intimidation from powerful officials and partisan groups wishing to silence their views?
Excerpt
Copyright © 2019 by Genevieve LaGreca. All rights reserved.
Cover by Watson Graphics
Available in paperback and ebook editions
Just the Truth
ISBN paperback: 978-0-97445795-6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons is purely coincidental.
Publisher’s email: service@wingedvictorypress.com
Prologue
His teacher had told him to stop asking so many questions. They disrupted the class, she’d said. Although he asked them in earnest, and she tried her best to reply, his questions too often pushed the bounds of her knowledge. She squirmed, and the children laughed. The little schoolhouse he attended in rural Virginia eventually became like a shoe that no longer fit the growing footprint of Julius Taninger’s intellectual curiosity.
At age ten, he’d decided he’d had enough of the place. Instead of going to school, he worked on his family’s small farm. On days when his chores were light, he walked the four miles of dirt road to town, where he borrowed books from the library of a local lawyer who took kindly to him. Julius devoured the titles he’d selected and returned them promptly, without so much as a smudge on any page, never wearing out the books—or his welcome. In 1948, with the country still recovering from the Second World War and his family nearly destitute, he read the histories of nations, the tomes of philosophers, and the classics in literature. These books lured him away from the dull landscape in which he chopped wood, fed hogs, and planted crops, toward a fresh canvas on which to paint his future.
At age fifteen, his fascination with the printed word drew him to the office of the town’s newspaper. He made himself useful by sweeping floors, emptying trash, filing papers, and doing other odd jobs without asking for or receiving any pay. The boss noticed his initiative and taught him how to set type and operate the press, which earned him a small salary. Soon he was contributing articles and making more money. After a hurricane struck the town, he set off another storm with his investigative reporting into a no-bid contract approved by the mayor for debris removal. He discovered that the contractor had a checkered past and the mayor was getting a kickback to ignore it. He also found that the mayor’s real talent lay in smearing anyone he perceived as an enemy. After the mayor and his friends launched a campaign to discredit the young reporter—“He’s a fool kid,” “He’s looking for attention,” “He just wants to make trouble,” “He lies”—no one believed Julius’s story. When the town turned against Julius, the editor pressured him to retract his accusations. When he refused, the editor fired him. Vindication came a year later when more evidence was uncovered, and the mayor and others involved in the scheme were tried and sent to jail. This experience spurred Julius’s drive to have his own paper—one that would never compromise the truth.
At age twenty, Julius Taninger’s footprint grew larger. He moved to Washington, DC, where he obtained a loan to buy his first newspaper, a struggling broadsheet named The Pulse of the People. He changed the name to Taninger News. The owner had a motto, which he never stated to his readers but shared with the young buyer: Capture the crowd at any price. Remembering how his former community had formed a gang of sorts that tried to crush him when he was a young reporter, he realized that his passions lay in capturing something else. He changed the motto to: Find the truth wherever it hides. Instead of keeping his slogan to himself as a marketing scheme, he printed it on the front page as a declaration.
Within a decade, he had increased the paper’s circulation to a national readership of millions, transforming his modest local daily into one of the highest-ranking newspapers in the country. He broadened the newspaper’s scope by adding top-notch reporters and correspondents in key cities around the country and the world. When he acquired thousands of acres of timberland in Canada, along with paper mills, power plants, and a fleet of ships to transport megatons of newsprint to his giant, never-still printing presses in Washington, DC, he developed a corporate empire spanning two countries. In subsequent years, he ventured into sports and entertainment and had a building erected to house his growing company’s headquarters. His holdings expanded to include television stations and a professional football team. Taninger News became part of a larger corporation, Taninger Enterprises.
Julius Taninger was tall, handsome, and rich. His quiet self-confidence gave the appearance of calm, except for restless gray eyes like two steely perpetual-motion machines that took in everything and missed nothing. His straight black hair fell of its own will across his forehead as the only part of him not subject to rigorous self-control. He was the town’s most striking bachelor, but no woman wanted him. His reputation for making enemies of the city’s most influential people kept the women away.
He kept his office on the newsroom floor, at the epicenter of the daily hurricane of activities that spewed the news, while the office suite designed for him on the top floor of his building sat idle.
When one of his major corporate advertisers was caught in a scandal, and his editor asked him if they should cover the story or ignore it, Julius replied, “Run it.”
When a powerful businessman-turned-politician tried to buy advertising space for his companies in exchange for favorable coverage of his political adventures, Julius replied, “We put our advertising columns up for sale, but we never sell editorial pages.”
When a small newspaper in Philadelphia was shut down by a new law spearheaded by a local politician to silence his enemies, Julius financed the publisher’s battle through the court system to get the law declared unconstitutional. He won.
When the president of the United States, in the heat of a reelection campaign, sent an aide to implore Julius to end his newspaper’s relentless attacks on the incumbent, and in exchange Taninger News would receive priority access to his administration and exclusive interviews with him, Julius replied, “No deal.”
When his fiery editorials excoriated the local mayor for proposing regulations and taxes harmful to business, Taninger Enterprises became victim to a truckers’ strike and a plant fire. After doing his own investigation, Julius discovered that the mayor was covertly driving the actions as retribution against a political enemy. The mayor feigned ignorance, claiming that coincidences happen. One actually did, and it was not to his honor’s liking. Julius had finally found a woman who admired him for the very qualities that scared off other prospects. She was the mayor’s daughter. To the indignation of her father, they eloped.
Julius refused invitations to the parties, golf games, and country clubs of the city’s social elite. He kept a chair's length away from the fangs and claws of the powerful, whom he oftentimes lashed in editorials printed in his newspaper. He signed those pieces with his iconic initials, affixed like a dare under his column: JT. Everyone called him JT, even his wife and the son and grandchildren they were to have.
His business and his life were inseparable. Other men would take their families on vacations—JT took his family along on business trips. Sharing the excitement and fascination for his work was JT’s version of family values. He took his son and later his grandchildren to corporate meetings with him, on trips to explore his vast properties, and on tours through his plants, explaining the business to them. When they grew up, they joined Taninger Enterprises.
Sometimes JT could be spotted by the newsstand outside his office building, where he found a quiet satisfaction in observing customers buy Taninger News and in seeing the stack of his newspapers dwindle on the shelf. Once, a father and child walked up to the newsstand while JT was there. The man took a copy of Taninger News from the stack. It had a photograph on the front page of the president of the United States with the leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives. As the customer paid for his purchase, his daughter, who looked to be about five years old, noticed the tall stranger watching them.
She pointed at the stack of papers and asked him, “What does a newspaper do?”
With the glower of a teacher reacting to delinquent students, JT gestured at the photograph of the nation’s leaders on the front page and replied, “It watches these rascals and keeps them in line.”
The years never softened Julius Taninger; instead, they hardened even more his crusty patina. Competitors feared him. Politicians smeared him. His wife revered him. As his son and grandchildren grew up in changing times and joined the business, they tolerated him, except for one granddaughter, who adored him. When other family members accused her of being just like her grandfather, they meant it as a criticism, but she took it as a compliment. Her name was Laura Taninger.
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About the Author
Genevieve (Gen) LaGreca writes novels with innovative plots, strong romance, and themes that glorify individual freedom and independence. She has written novels of all different genres including historical, mystery and romance fiction as well as short stories. She is one of the successful new indie authors whose novels have topped the charts in the popular ebook format. Her three previously published novels, Noble Vision, A Dream of Daring, and Fugitive From Asteron have been Amazon Kindle Best Sellers and won 11 book awards.
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Website: https://wingedvictorypress.com
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