← THE ARCADE  /  STEVEN GREER  /  THE PRESS CONFERENCE

The Steven Greer Experience • Cabinet No. 2

The Press
Conference

Twelve people who spent their careers inside the machine have agreed to say what they saw, on the record, under their own names, in front of cameras. You have eight podium slots, eighty-four minutes of floor time, and a press corps that has covered nine of these and believed none of them. The order you put them in is the entire ballgame.

DOORS 09:30 • GAVEL 10:00 • WIRE DEADLINE 12:00
Press credibility42 / 100
Floor time booked0 / 84 min
Seated: 0 / 8
Q&A: 84 min free

 

Running order — 8 podium slots0 booked

The witnesses — twelve agreed to come12 waiting

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At the podium

 

 

The press rowFive desks. Two of them are here for the sandwiches.

 

Tap a witness to seat them in the next open slot. Tap a slot to cut them. Arrows reorder.

Nine Thirty. They Are Actually Here.

Every one of them has something to lose by walking through that door and every one of them walked through it anyway. Your job today is not persuasion. It is sequencing.

Eight slots. Eighty-four minutes. Twelve witnesses who between them need a hundred and fifteen. You are going to cut people who drove here, and the ones you cut are not going to get another room like this, and you have to do it anyway, because a program that runs long is a program the wire services leave early.

The room will teach you the rules if you let it. Watch the meter. Watch the back table. Nobody in that press row is hostile — they are tired, which is worse.

WING DOCTRINE: This cabinet does not run on irony. In May 2001 a press conference at the National Press Club put roughly twenty named military, intelligence and aviation witnesses on the public record in a single afternoon — more than the previous fifty years had managed combined. Our grievance with this wing has always been the invoice: the folding chair, the tiered retreat pricing, the sky sold by the seat. It has never once been the witnesses, and it has never been that Wednesday. The twelve on tonight's roster are composites written for a game; the room they are standing in was real, and it cost the people in it something to be there. Play accordingly.