Cable news fail:There's been some
talk about the waste of time that the cable news networks spent on "balloon boy". But this is nothing new.
Rembember
John Karr?
He's the guy who who made a false confession regarding the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey. When the story broke it was obvious that there were many problems with it and that it merited
extreme skepticism. But the cables went wall-to-wall with it for days.
That was a little over 3 years ago. Has everybody forgotten?
posted by Quiddity at 10/16/2009 05:29:00 PM
What a load of garbage. The news networks made a ton of money off of the story, and it ended in the best possible way.
Would the story have been "better" if:
1) The child had been in the balloon, in enormous danger, but survived uninjured, but traumatized.
2) The child survived the ride, but lost digits or limbs to frostbite or suffered injury due to the balloon bouncing around in the air or the high voltage electrical equipment supposedly in the balloon?
3) The lifeless body of the child was removed from the landed balloon?
4) The broken body of the child was found in a cornfield where he fell from thousands of feet?
Those are the only ways I can think of that the story could have been "authentic." Some people seem to be disappointed, apparently on the grounds that a child was not subjected to a fatal tragedy or traumatizing experience.
There are some ugly priorities on display.
I for one think it's cool that in this day and age, some people can still live their lives sort of like the Pott family in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, building real flying saucers and actually doing stuff that most people daydream about.
We remember the same way we remember a jingle or a sonic ear worm like "It's a Small World."
