PUNK'D

The Final Balloon Boy "Reveal": TV News Gets An Epic Fail

BY NOW, WE SHOULD BE QUESTIONING IF FALCON IS REALLY EVEN HIS NAME.

You've no doubt seen it: the video of Richard Heene and his captive family being interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer shortly after the nation was transfixed by a runaway balloon purportedly carrying the 6-year-old boy aboard.

It was during this on-air conversation that the boy slipped that he didn't respond to frantic calls because "we did this for the show."

I didn't catch the drama unfolding live on national cable TV Thursday morning. So when I saw this video, what caught my attention most was the nervous twitching by the three Heene boys and their sideward glances at their dad and each other. The video suggests at least to me that Heene may be an unpredictable tyrant.

The immediacy with which the Balloon Boy unfolded live on television is a cautionary tale for our brave new world of media. Because it was all happening "live," the cable networks fed it in real time on air and Twitter lighted up with commentary. Mere hours later, websites were offering Balloon boy T-shirts for sale.

The farce was proof that television news directors don't really care if the story is real or false; all they want is live drama to spike the ratings.

Even before Gawker paid for an interview with a former assistant of Heene's who claims the two concocted the hoax, CNN interviewed a body language specialist who concluded the family was hiding something. Suspicions were rampant on the web, too, where "incredulous observers were asking: Is it all a hoax?,'' according to the New York Times.

Now that charges are pending against Richard Heene for his outrageous prank, let's hope the takeaway lesson is that television epically failed, that the public was punk'd, and that immediacy is no substitute for credibility.