I am one of the lucky people who missed the recent Balloon Boy stunt. I didn’t hear it on the radio, see it on CNN or even follow it on Twitter. That is so unlike me! Usually I am as tuned-in as one can be and not be an iPod. But somehow or other, I must have been working or involved in a serious endeavor, so I missed all the excitement–which I gather, contained endless views of a silver UFO-shaped balloon floating aimlessly over the Colorado plains. I also gather this hoax consumed the day-time news, a prominent spot on the evening news, and enough air time to qualify for a spot on Amazing Bloopers next season (if that show returns).
Think of that: the Dad-with-a-big-idea about self-promoting - he may make it back on TV yet. He may also have enough material to write a book about his exploits, including his stint on Wife-Swap and also his recent scuffle with the law. Well, actually, he’s not the first or last person to fool the news media and law enforcement - but his October escapade may qualify for the most ridiculous non-news story of the year .
Disgruntled as I and a lot of other people may be, not all of this story is hot-air. We might actually learn something from the hype that was generated by Heeney (hereafter known as Heeney-Hyper). Here are a few lessons from the now-deflated Balloon Boy stunt:
1. The news media, in general, spends too much time on stories that do not matter and not enough time on stories that do matter. Now, it could have been a tragedy if Balloon Boy had actually been stowed away on the balloon, but in the good old days of journalism, a crack reporter might have checked to see if any one had thoroughly searched the home to see if and where the boy was hiding (some of my psychic friends said they knew he was hiding, and you needn’t have the 6th sense to figure that out). Lesson learned: stay away from news channels that dwell on celebrities and related bizarre oddities. PBS usually gets it right, and covers the news. But a lot of broadcast news coverage has become TMZ’d.
2. As Abraham Lincoln once said, "…You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time." Ask Heeney how likely he is to try another hoax. It was also P.T. Barnum who said, "A sucker is born every minute." The Balloon-Boy story is just the latest example of the truth of thse two old quotes. Lesson learned: Suckers are still being born and people are still being fooled. Not even the fabulous internet has changed that.
3. There have been a lot of UFO reported sightings over the plains of Colorado. You can check them out, for yourself, on MUFON, or take my word for it, since I lived in Colorado and met a few people who’d actually been chased by some. It seems to me if the Balloon, sans boy, had floated away, some one would have reported it as a UFO, because weather balloons are often mistaken for alien aircraft. Just ask the good people of Roswell, New Mexico, circa 1947. This is another example of art imitating life or visa-versa. Lesson learned: Not all UFOs are weather balloons and not all weather balloons have enough space in them to carry away even a small child. Pay attention to the details.
4. Reality TV turns ordinary people into celebrities, when they are just ordinary people wearing make up, who work for free. Even Reality TV producers admit that their programs are edited, massaged and packaged as entertainment. If you want to watch real reality TV, plant yourself in front of a security monitor stationed at a teller counter in the bank (I saw myself standing in line, and it was truly really scary!). Watching a security monitor for 30 minutes might just be enough to cure you of ever wanting to watch reality TV again. Lesson learned: Take all reality TV programs with a grain of salt - or maybe buckets of salt. Most reality TV is not reality.
If we learn from our mistakes, like falling for this fake story and spending time engrossed in it, maybe we can avoid wasting time on some other self-promoting hucksters. Maybe we can again elevate news to where it belongs and hold it to a high standard. Or maybe, if we do enjoy watching a trickster waste precious news time that could be used to cover something significant, like unemployment or health care or Afghanistan, we can, at the very least, come clean about our little viewing secret. Let’s just never call it news.
