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At last, the Balloon Boy saga has reached metaphysical ubiquity, with the last national media outlet seemingly immune to the appeal of little Falcon Heene — National Public Radio — finally surrendering.
Of course, NPR being NPR, the approach taken in two stories yesterday was more highfalutin than high flying. First up, Michele Norris interviewed Bill Hayes, who heads the company behind Jon & Kate Plus 8; Hayes declared that the Heene family probably wouldn’t have gotten past his firm’s background check — and given how loopy the Gosselins have been of late, that speaks volumes. Immediately afterward, august, ninety-something news analyst Daniel Schorr opined about the thin line bewtween lies and hoaxes even as he placed the weenie Heenes in a historical context alongside the Orson Welles/War of the Worlds panic of the ’30s, the bogus Hitler diaries and false Twitter reports about Kanye West’s death.
That’s the kind of attention for which Richard Heene clearly lusted — but it doesn’t pay as well as a network-TV contract.
