You have no doubt heard the “balloon boy” hoax involving six-year-old Falcon Heene, who was “accidentally” swept away on a giant balloon in mid October. And you couldn’t have missed the story about Northwest Airlines Flight 188 a week later that overflew its destination in Minneapolis by 150 miles, because the pilots Timothy Cheney and Richard Cole were distracted with their laptops.
If you missed the two stories, congratulations. You ducked the drivel dished out by television and the Internet, on which both stories were replayed in their excruciatingly minutest details.
The United States remains mired in a financial morass that may well tip the economy into a double dip recession; Congress is debating a major overhaul of the health care system that touches a sixth of the U.S. economy; and the country is entangled in two vexing wars, both of which it is at risk of losing. But the U.S. media are hell bent upon titillating us capers in the sky!
To be sure, there is, and always has been, room for the unusual, the bizarre and the frivolous in the media. The Little India Briefs section at the back of the book plucks such cute stories too. There is nothing wrong about being amused or gripped by human tragedy, conquest or drama. The problem is when the freak shows become the main course, instead of the condiment or the appetizer. Wall to wall coverage for days on end by cable and broadcast television about a dysfunctional couple who exploited public goodwill and their children to garner publicity for a reality television show … surely that is over the top. To then haul in self-appointed “legal authorities” and “family counselors” to debate, ad nauseam, the family’s criminal and civil exposure bordered on the loony.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Falcon Heene poses with his family beside the balloon his father falsely reported had carried him away.
Crazy people file false police reports for attention. Professional pilots occasionally do dumb things. The world has tons of nuts and freaks. We get it. And every now and then we want to be entertained by their idiotic antics. But spare us the breathless reruns and endless loops, will you? In fact, but for the original, foolhardy and irresponsible coverage of the “balloon boy” stunt by cable networks, there would have been no national hoopla to begin with. Instead, the story of the initial heart-tugging story became the new story, and then the sky caved in.
Frequently, more important than what the media report is what they don’t. And what is not reported is often sacrificed at the altar of the easy and the trivial. Stories of war and peace, glory and tragedy, excess and desperation, remain untold, because the media are engaged in electronic navel gazing. We are witnessing a revival of the vaudeville.
Curiously, the vaudeville, the most popular entertainment form in North America in the early 20th century, withered into obscurity around the Great Depression. Done in by new entertainment forms, most notably film, vaudeville’s death knell was officially rung on Nov. 16, 1932, when its capitol and epicenter, the New York City Palace Theater, built just 20 years earlier, switched completely to a movie theater.
Let’s hope, 77 years later, that the Great Recession of 2009 stirs the American public to pounding nails into the coffins of the electronically resurrected vaudevilles.
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