I was at home last Thursday recovering from a long vacation when I overheard my favorite obnoxious conservative radio host going on and on in an anguished tone about how a young child might be aboard a “mushroom shaped” object that was flying high above the Denver suburbs.  Eventually, the host asked his audience to imagine their own children in the balloon in much the same way he asks listeners to imagine their child receiving life saving surgery at the hands of a doctor who achieved his rank by virtue of affirmative action.
 

I’m so familiar with his routine that I was certain his far-flung balloon discussion was the start of a pathetically convoluted hypothetical that was designed to make his listeners agree that torture was good. To my surprise, instead of crafting an implausible scenario about a dirty bomb in the balloon in order to get listeners to agree that the police should have the ability to gouge out someone’s eye to find out how to stop it, the host just kept talking about the balloon and his concern for its young occupant.  When I finally realized the discussion was never going to turn to the ills of multilingual ballots, taxation, or Islam, I turned off the radio and switched to CNN just in time to see what looked like a large bag of Jiffy Pop flinging its way across the screen.

I haven’t watched cable news in years but spent the next twenty minutes or so mesmerized by a guy named Rick on CNN who, along with his female counterpart, were giving second by second accounts of what was happening and talking in real time to various hot-air balloon “experts” and asking them questions such as whether it was a good idea to drop weights on a balloon to slow it down.

At one point, a very believable woman interrupted the coverage to mention that Falcon, the little boy, may have fallen or jumped out of the balloon prior to takeoff and that indeed, a member of the boy’s family had said as much.  For roughly four seconds, CNN slowed its coverage, but quickly brushed the report aside in favor of a soothing discussion with its enthusiastic weather man about the effects of oxygen deprivation, the potential for the wind to blow the balloon into the path of an airplane or into the Rockies, and quantity of power lines in Kansas.

There was tremendous debate among the guests and moderators about whether the balloon was seven feet across or 20 feet across and this uncertainty persisted for the duration of the event despite the fact that with my naked eye I could see that if it were seven feet across, the payload would be roughly the size of a shoe box meaning the six-year old inside would have to be approximately eight inches tall, which on its own would have been a bigger story than the fact that he was trapped in a weather balloon. 
 

Contributing to the overall panic was the fact that the balloon appeared to be traveling just south of the speed of sound because the video was being taken, intentionally, from helicopters that were hovering below and at awkward angles in relation to the craft.  Even though it was doing its best to dramatize the footage, CNN was reporting its speed at between 20 and 30 MPH, which Rick frequently reminded viewers would “still be enough of a speed to be a fantastic crash for the little one.” 

A few minutes before the balloon landed in a cornfield, Rick was talking to yet another expert who was making a convincing case that unless the boy was roughly the size of a hamster he was not aboard, given that the balloon was half-deflated, and any weight at all would have caused its contents to distribute evenly about the bag.  Rick, looked annoyed by the logical suggestion that was undermining his attempt at creating hysteria, briefly mentioned the previous story about the boy never having been aboard, and brushed it aside by saying that if it were the case it would be “very sad news.”

When the balloon came down it was immediately clear that there was no six year old aboard, or that paramedics were attempting to rescue him by hitting him on the head with shovels and rolling him and the balloon into a ball.  When Rick realized that the boy was not inside his tone turned to disappointment and he sounded more annoyed than relieved.  

I won’t say I knew it was a hoax from the jump but by the time CNN explained that the boy’s family had appeared on a recent reality TV series, I was sure CNN was going to look stupid.  Even though I can’t condone this family’s felonious conduct, we should all thank them for making CNN and the rest of the cable news networks look like morons.  It was this exact brand of believe-anything-tragedy-first leg-humping that got us into Iraq and if we haven’t learned anything about the importance of a thoughtful media by now, we deserve an occasional flying saucer to keep us honest.