THE BOY IN THE BALLOON
If you live anywhere in the Western world, you already know what this piece is about, just by the title. Last Thursday, believing that 6-year-old Falcon Heene had somehow crawled into a home-made balloon that got loose and was racing through the Colorado sky, authorities took chase and the media followed suit ... for two solid hours! First it turned out that Falcon wasn’t in the balloon, and now it seems that the whole thing was an intentional deception, created by Falcon’s father, Richard Heene, in order to snag a reality show for his family. At the moment it looks like Mr. Heene is in for a severe dose of reality himself. But that's not the real story.
The real story is about a media would spend two hours of air time – our time, public air time – covering a story that had little or no consequence for most of us. Yes, the boy could have been in the balloon and he might have been killed and that would have been a tragedy. But children die every day – handfuls are dying now of Swine flu – so why was this particular story so compelling? Certainly it was more graphic and dramatic and ultimately it was a ratings magnate, which, unfortunately, seems to be all the media is interested in.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. In the last sixty years the media has covered dozens of tension-filled rescue stories about children in peril - babies falling down wells, young girls kidnapped by predators – and done so not just for hours but for days at a time. The media's greed is fed by the public's desire to watch other people in trouble.
Maybe it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff. The wheat, in this case, would be real news - politics, weather, world events - and the chaff would be the endless variety of boys in balloons. I think there's a place for it, I just think it should be identified as what it ist. Just as editorial pieces in the newspaper are labeled as such, perhaps the broadcast media, during live coverage of such an event, could continuously flash a warning sign in the corner of the screen: "ENTERTAINMENT" or "FLUFF". I could live with that.
posted by Bart Braverman @ 8:05 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Being a fairly new reader of your blog, first let me say how refreshing it is to find someone with like-minded views on recent news events and topics. And for that I thank you. Well, to get on with commentating, indeed, all this on "balloon boy" or "box boy" or whatever, seems to be a large distraction for the media and we do have far greater issues to consider. A good example of one child that *should* have made more national news, because his story puts a face on a far greater crisis, is young Deamonte Driver. He was a 12 year old boy who died of a horrible tooth infection. His father had lost what health coverage they had and his parents were to poor to come up with even the $50 that was demanded to be paid prior to his treatment. How disgusting (I wish I could think of a stronger word, but what word works for a situation such as this) to think that we have come to essentially putting a price on the life of a child in this country. And it's all of $50 at that. The fact that young Deamonte passed is a tragedy and the fact that the media chooses to ignore his and who knows how many other variations on that story is a travesty. Instead of actual facts being reported on health care, we get coverage from town hall meetings of some super genious yelling "keep government out of my medicare". My goodness...
And one final thing in regard to Dick Cheney, a man who never seems to fail to live up to his name -- I'd be totally OK with coverage of him floating off to Middle Earth or parts unknown in a silver Jiffy Pop balloon.
From a kindred spirit in Baltimore,
Dana Marie R. who's borrowing bf's Google account to commentate today.
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