I was busy yesterday and completely offline all afternoon, so by the time I caught first wind about the story with the balloon and the kid, they had just found the kid on the ground, hiding. But this ridiculous story led the local 6:00 newscast AND the network newscast, and the frothing twats at our local NBC station were ready to go wall-to-wall with it all night long if the kid hadn’t turned up about two minutes into their newscast. They had reporters live at various locations to cover this IMPORTANT STORY…even though this was happening in Colorado and NOT Boston. They had “Experts” lining up to explain about how balloons work. They had animated SCARE-O-VISION graphics and that “Voice of Doom” voice-over guy they use all cued up and ready to use over and over and over. And I will wager you any amount of money that at least one station in every single major media market in the country did the exact same thing. And all you had to do was look at that balloon to know that there was no way in hell it was going to support the weight of a small child. Is there a television news director left anywhere in the country who isn’t a complete moron?
Even if it turns out that this was a complete stunt on the part of the family involved (and I can’t make up my mind if it is or not), every working television journalist in America needs to take a long, deep look inside themselves and honestly question what the hell they are doing if this sort of inanity receives that much of their time and attention. Seems to me that maybe we would be better served if the newspapers stayed in business and the television news networks were the ones shutting down; newspapers are guilty of a lot of sensationalism, too, but this story would have had time to play itself out before a single inch of print could be wasted on it.
UPDATE: Since some people coming here via the CNN link can’t play nice, I have turned comments off
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