For four hours one sunny afternoon in October, a floating quilt of tin foil, Visqueen, and duct tape captivated a bored American news media. One z-list reality star, looking to jump to c-list reality star, took his too-honest six-year-old on a media blitz that made Obama look unambitious, and was given two days of sit-downs and exclusives and front-pages from our largest news outlets.
Three days later, Ashton walked out of a Colorado courthouse to tell us what we’d all just started to figure out: we had indeed been Punk’d.
Suddenly, the only story the media wanted to cover more than Balloon Boy was Balloon Boy’s awful, dishonest, lying, cheating, pathetic, poor, and now criminal father. By the end of the day, commentators were talking about taking Richard Heene’s kids away, and the whole bored American nation had turned against him.
If Heene learns anything from this incident (although that seems very unlikely), it should be that there is no greater crime in the eyes of the self-proclaimed “Fourth Branch” than to make that very institution, the noble, honest, Constitution-protected Press, look foolish. They are the gatekeepers: they dictate the national consciousness.
However, some rogue members of the mighty Press have been brazen enough to criticize themselves and their colleagues for the coverage of the incident. Linda Holmes wrote on NPR.com that the incident demonstrated that the modern media is more concerned about reporting with certainty than reporting with truth.
Speaking of media reaction to young Falcon’s now-famous comments to Wolf Blitzer – “We did this for a show” – Holmes said: “It's just a bit disheartening to see, less than 24 hours after the last time so many people labored under a misunderstanding of the circumstances of this same situation, that there's so little reluctance to jump to a conclusion about what's going on now. Surrounded by coverage and surrounded by guessing, it's gotten very hard to shrug your shoulders.”
The media shift from saying something factual to just, well, saying something has been in the spotlight since the 2000 election, when CBS and NBC famously declared that Florida – and the presidency – had been taken by Al Gore, only to later give them to W., only to eventually admit that they really had no clue who won. NBC’s own report on the incident stated that “Being right, not first, is what matters.”
But despite countless Poynter criticisms and SNL parodies and lost viewers, being first is still the standard for which most news outlets seem to strive. Just watch your local evening news, which is the only news medium that is still a regular financial success across the board. “First at Five!” they say. “Your first look, from Channel 6!” “The 13 crew was first on the scene!” Ever hear a commercial for “CBS 10, always correct!” Or how about, “WTHR 13, we report the truth!”
The bottom line is that this is a want-it-now culture. We text because we can’t wait until after we’re done driving home to tell our sister how our date went. We buy mortgages we can’t afford because it’s unfair for our friends to have nicer houses than us. If our pizza isn’t in our stomachs within 30 minutes of us deciding we’re hungry, we demand a refund. The dangers of car accidents, impending foreclosures, and crappy pizzas don’t cross our demanding minds.
So who cares whether the kid was actually in the damn balloon? The truth came out – in the Internet age, it always does. (Ask Mark Sanford.) There was a time when the common man had little access to information outside his own tiny existence. There was a need for Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward, those willing to dig a little and take a little time, if it meant getting the story right.
But those days are long past. We don’t need a report of what happened at Lakehurst anymore; we’re watching the flames live. The real tragedy of this all isn’t the fall of Big Media; Big Media still exists, it’s just run by us. The tragedy is that after millions of us are led on a wild-goose chase across the Colorado landscape, after a balloon that we would have known probably couldn’t even lift off with a boy inside had we stopped to call one physicist, is that we’re all dumb enough to applaud and ask for more.
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i understand that the 24hour news cycle gives a lot of attention to stories that don't really matter. but i maintain that balloon boy was a legit news story.
1. since 9/11, any time something flies and shuts down an airport, that's news.
2. "dog bites man, not a story. man bites dog, story." so even though the war in afgan. and the economy are more important stories, they have been happening every day for a long time. can't remember the last time a wierd science experiment may or may not be carrying a little kid across 3 counties.
3. i think a lot of people thought the kid might not be in the balloon...and i guess i don't know, did any of the news outlets say that the boy was definitely in the balloon? or did they jsut say "believed to be?" cause maybe that's the difference between responsible and irresponsible reporting.