Balloon busters

Last week our country gripped its television sets close as 6-year old Falcon Heene made his supposed journey on a homemade balloon.

The story broke as the balloon flew through the air like a silver muffin with the boy believed to be aboard the craft.

What could have been the perfect ingredients for a Disney movie (“The boy that dared to dream. His amazing adventures among the clouds!”) turned dramatic as reports came in that something or someone had fallen out.

Hasn’t he seen “Up”?

This only increased when the balloon finally landed with no one inside.

No one wished the boy harm, but to say that viewers didn’t watch expecting to witness some terrible tragedy or amazing miracle is like saying that fans don’t go to NASCAR races wanting to see a car pile-up.

At that point, the boy better have been riding a cloned dinosaur or discovering El Dorado, because I was emotionally primed for an exciting story.

It was later discovered that Falcon was simply, hiding in the attic and ignored his parents and authorities’ cries “for the show.”

That phrase, accidentally spilled during a live interview, has led many to believe the parents had planned the event as a marketing ploy for a new show. The Heene family has appeared on reality shows, and a video leaked onto the Internet where the family screams in terror as the balloon supposedly takes their son away.  

There’s a large amount of evidence that the family wasted government resources and time in a bid at fame. Hopefully the local authorities will take action against the parents.

The significance of this story is what it says about news media.

Wolf Blitzer’s interrogation of the Heene family cut deeper than he has with any politician or public figure in months. I understand the allure of reporting news-in-progress; journalists get to sit back and provide common sense commentary on live news footage for several hours and it gives great ratings.

But this type of news never focuses on events that affect anyone but the subject.

There’s always a moment when the coverage ends where things get awkward in the newsrooms and anchors think in their minds, “So what else is going on?”

Most viewers wanted to know the end of this story, and that’s logical. There’s many a night where I’ve gotten sucked into another Lifetime Abused Woman Story Of The Month for these same reasons.

Newscasters need to adopt the time delay used to censor out cursing in live broadcasts and make it several hours instead of a few seconds. Having a little time to think about this story before reporting it could’ve saved a lot of time and hassle.

I took a similar method for writing this column and wrote whatever came to my mind. I originally meant to talk about the dangers of ballooning as a hobby, and now we have this mess on our hands.