Just Look Away From The ‘Balloon Boy’
In the aftermath of the Balloon Boy story, there are some questions to be answered. Not just the obvious questions like “What the heck is wrong with this boy’s father, Richard Heene?” but also the question: “Why is the media fascinated with stories like this?”
For six hours Thursday, the world stopped as people were riveted to their television sets, watching a runaway balloon that possibly had a little boy inside it. While that balloon was afloat, millions of people were terrified. And just as many people were cynical, making jokes about it and calling Heene a publicity whore.
Who can blame the cynics? The Balloon Boy saga is a classic case of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Or, in this case, The Man Who Cried “Look at Me!” The minute this saga hit the airwaves, people Googled the Heene name and realized what they were dealing with, leading them to disbelieve the idea that there actually was a six-year-old boy in that balloon and lean more toward the theory that Richard Heene was looking for more attention.
By now, we all know the background of the Heene family. Two appearances on Wife Swap, extreme weather chasers, UFO watchers, a failed pitch to TLC for a Heene family reality show, YouTube videos, and dangerous stunts.
Eventually the story of Balloon Boy became a non-story, as the kid was found hiding in an attic. But then a new and more troublesome story took hold. Everyone wanted to know about this quirky family and their daredevil, obnoxious father. Which means Richard Heene, at the expense of his family’s privacy, is living out his dream. He’s a star. Even if for a short time, he’s a media moment, a name that everyone now knows and he’s going to do his best to parlay that into a television show.
After the sensation died down, in the aftermath of all the headlines and special reports and people transfixed to their televisions, the armchair experts come out of the woodwork and ask, “Why?” Why is the media obsessed with this story? Why did they devote six hours to a runaway UFO when there are so many more important things going on in the world?
“Even though Falcon Heene was safe, we were left with the feeling that our emotions were being manipulated by his father; we, the audience, were just useful pawns in his game of fame. So of course we keep watching.”
Heene used the same tactics employed by the Fox Fibber Team (Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc.): Make up a plot, show the evidence (balloon), hide the real evidence, and profit from it.
Remember, the Romans had deadly gladiator fights and fed the Christians to the lions, just like our modern versions of dog fights, reality shows (people eating filthy stuff or eating contests), boxing, all under the pretense of ‘entertaining’ the masses.
There’s an easy solution to all this.
Put Heene on his own reality show called “Punch the Dickhead” where members of the public take turns practicing uppercuts and overhand-rights on the publicity seeking loser.
That way, Heene gets to live his “fame-at-all-costs” fantasy, the morons who watch reality shows get their next fix of brainless nonsense and the rest of us get the satisfaction of knowing that someone is getting their just deserts.
Everyone’s a winner.
Ok, vivo, which BS story did those Fox hosts make up? ACORN workers willingly funding houses that would employ underage illegal alien hookers? Anita “Lizard Lips” Dunn approvingly quoting Mao before high school students? Van Jones being a troofer? Two good ol’ boys being lenient on a repeat child molester in Oklahoma? Constantly repeating a Limbaugh quote approving the institution of slavery, and saying the guy who killed MLK was just fab?
Oops, so sorry, that last one was MSNBC and CNN. And even though Limbaugh has said some pretty bad stuff, he didn’t say those things or anything close to them. My bad!
I don’t care much for Fox, but it seems that every time they make a sensational charge, it turns out to be true AND they have the evidence to back it up. Maybe if the other networks did the same, Fox wouldn’t be cleaning their clocks?
Please don’t misunderstand me: I think this is a very strange family. The mother and father seem, to my layman’s eyes at least, to be exhibiting unhealthy (if more and more common, in the present age) attention-seeking behavior.
But are we really feeling satisfied about the likely arrest of the father because his son said, offhand, that what he did was “for the show?” Hopefully, there is some other evidence the sheriff is going on that we just don’t know about yet. Because the babbling of a six-year-old doesn’t seem, to me anyway, to be very reliable probable cause for an arrest.
And are we really cheering or feeling satisfied about ironically-named “child services” agencies getting involved? Yes, taking your children on “storm-chasing” expeditions can be dangerous. So can homemade fireworks displays on the Fourth of July. So can teaching your kid to ride a bike.
“Child services” will use our concern for children (and, in this case, our anger at having been emotionally manipulated by a bogus story) to kidnap children on flimsy evidence or no evidence at all.
And because this guy is “famous,” or because we find his flaws distasteful, conservatives and libertarians are cheering the machinery of the state now being deployed against him and his family?
Heene used the same tactics employed by the Fox Fibber Team (Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc.): Make up a plot, show the evidence (balloon), hide the real evidence, and profit from it.
Interesting. Can you provide an illustration or example of that formula in action?
#1 Can you give us some examples of this?
This family was on a show “wife swap”, and they were “different”, to be kind..
However, it is the fault of the news making such a big deal of something they weren’t sure of. It seems a red flag would have gone up when mom called the media “first”….I think the news is angry they were duped. Like “spaghetti trees”. No one was hurt, except the press..
How was this kid “endangered”?? I don’t see it.
They made this week’s The Soup (the show that has it right about celebrities: they exist on our real-world plane only to be cruelly and rightfully mocked as the worthless clowns they are). And apparently were on it before. I think that sums them up.
And as for following the Fox model, I don’t recall them making a car “accidentally” blow up with explosives (NBC) or pretending that Audi drivers, and only Audi drivers, ran their cars through garage doors by mistaking the gas peddle for the break (CBS — and then there was their kingsized botch with MS Office for IBM Selectrics1973).
Anything strange & unexpected will get the media’s attention; I’m glad President Obama’s prefabricated town hall was upstaged by a hoax balloon story. However, at the time, the media did not know it was a hoax & got sucked in for the strangeness of a boy supposedly getting lost in a homemade balloon. More of the truth reveals more of strangeness of the family. It eats itself.
After the O.J. Simpson trial and Michael Jackson media extravaganza……I sort of felt the press deserved a costly wild goose chase. It will keep em on their toes and cause them to do some work for their earnings. They have had too many stories handed to them on a plate.
Anyone could see from the first pictures of the balloon that it would not carry a toddler.
It was funny at first then when it became just another try at another fifteen minutes of fame at the expense of the kids, well now there needs to be some charges filed or next time this clown WILL put one of his kids in a balloon and set it loose.
#1 Vivo:
Ahh, but you ignore what should be obvious-even to a Huffpo bloated imbiber like you.
The roman games followed the decline of the roman work ethic-and the availability of handouts to the city masses. Long gone was the “mean” society–the one that insisted that people should work hard, obey the law etc. How square. How retro. Let’s go watch some games and get some free food.
Most of the best selling books now–oops–Non-fiction books–are by conservative authors or at least people that don’t like high taxes, high welfare payments, and high spending. The tv shows watch by most right wingers? News. By left wingers? Joy Behar, the View, whatever–but not news.
So who is entertained more by the mindless reality shows? Readers? Or the people channel surfing after Joy Behar? The people who worry about inflation and debt? or the “hey we’ll just borrow our way to riches and prosperity” types? Take a guess.
Blackwell, Lili and company, don’t hold your breath.
vivo tries in vain to paint himself as an ‘Independent’.
The only thing vivo is independent of is cognition..
Or, just ditch the TV and the cable subscription. Remember, just because you watch only three channels doesn’t mean you aren’t paying for the other 66.
#12 paul…but its so FRUSTRATING to see a sentient being so impervious to facts or logic of any kind. And his vote counts as much as mine!
Blackwell, no worries. The fairness doctrine is a dream for those like-minded people. Free thinking, lucid discussion is a real bummer for some..
The bubble boy and family made a crucial mistake in this fiasco. They shared their idea with 1 other person.
No secret is safe when shared..
What kind of father puts his son on national TV expecting him to lie?
I would barf too.
Reminds me of another fame seeker. Keep an eye on this guy, he could be the next president.
My mother saw this family a couple of weeks ago on Wife Swap. She said the father was a nutcase and the wife was kind of weird to say the least. My heart goes out to the children. Nature and Nurture have both failed these kids.
My dislike for Fox is not about WHAT they say, but HOW they say it. It’s like watching a kid who got in a fight and the story’s embellishment just gets out hand.
You’re right, vivo. It would be so much better if Glenn Beck used the calm, rational, measured tones of Keith Olbermann or that Cramer guy.
Loved, the movie, Lilli,
the birther thing, tea-party being the biggest march on Washington ever (a very ok, free speech event, but the numbers were way exagerated), Obama a racist, czars being unconstitutional, that’s just a recent ones….
There’s Vince Foster, travelgate, etc….
Should we give them a pass on WMD’s, Saddam being a member of Al-Quaeda and those most all media missed ?
But much more to the point, is the various corporate puppet-masters on the right AND THE LEFT, make YOU, Ms. Lil, concentrate on the punch and judy show instead of the principles shared in bad governance on both sides:
1) rule by moneyed elites against other moneyed elites
2) putting incompetant friends into positions better served by boring, anonymous COMPET3NT bureaucrats (Van Jones, Brownie and Fema, Most of the Carter administration, Acorn in any Government role, Bush’s withdrawn Supreme court nominee…it’s a long list)
3) joke Veeps (Ford, Carter, and Kennedy only exceptions since FDR…including nearly all the Veep Candidates).
4) gaming the system, gaming the media coverage of system until nobody even knows there is anything other than the gaming.
While the output of the traditional TV press is still hooked up to a bigger video monitor than the Internet is it must exploit this remaining edge to survive. Once our PCs and Macs are hooked up to monitors as large as our TVs traditional TV news media will join newspapers in the museum of media paleontology.
vivo the Richard Heene of the blogosphere. You don’t like Fox News don’t watch. I doubt anyone is holding a weapon to your head. I don’t watch the other channels because I want accurate news not what they perceive as news. Everyone gets tired of listening to a whiner .
I’m glad you liked the movie, Dr Matt, but I think you are missing the plot.
All I wanted to know was….what story did Fox break that was later proved false. That was it. vivo couldn’t provide one, and instead went off that he/she didn’t like the tone.
As far as your charges, O’Reilly said that there were only about 70k people at the Tea Party rally in DC, and I never heard them back the birther thing. Yeah, they reported on the birther thing, but I only recall Lou Dobbs of CNN actually supporting it. (Oops. Different network.)
Obama a racist…maybe….considering that he went off on his own grandma being a “typical white person” when confronted by teenage males (that’s the way to thank the woman who paid for your schooling!), he didn’t know that the Rev. Wright said anything that could be considered racist (even though he sat in the pews of a black liberation theology church for about twenty years), and immediately decided that the white cop in Cambridge had to be in the wrong even though he knew nothing of the details of the incident (his own words). But since I don’t know the gentleman personally, I’ll reserve judgment.
Please point out to me where the Constitution has anything about “czars” that control different departments of the federal government (whose heads are, in fact, confirmed by the Senate as decreed in the Constitution), if you would? I don’t think that job title is in there.
Sorry, I’m a bit too tender in years to remember what, if anything, they said about Vince Foster, travelgate, Monica Lewinsky, etc.
To be fair to Jim Cramer, Cramer doesn’t tell people his opinion on the issues; he just tells people how to profit from what he expects to happen.
There are about threes stories here on CNN:
1) CNN was staffed by idiots that couldn’t properly calculate whether the balloon of that size could fly with a 65 pound boy (probably not – it would hover or bounce at best)
2) CNN didn’t detect the hoax even when the kid showed up and said “its for a show” – it still took a couple of days
3) Thus in some ways the damage was actually done by CNN – if they had done a fact check, we never would have heard of balloon boy except maybe as a 30 second story. He certainly wouldn’t have made Larry King, thereby passing another set of screeners.
The other story, what people will do for fame, is old news – ask Hinkly Jr and Jodie Foster.