If the story about the boy in the balloon has illustrated anything, it would be that the honus is now on the people consuming the news media to filter for reliable information. Long gone are the days when journalists would ask the hard-hitting questions and fact check a story before running with it.
Now, if you are someone who has been paying attention, this is hardly news to you. In fact, I would suspect that if you are anything like me, you called this whole thing a hoax before the balloon even landed. The couple had apparently starred on a reality show called Wife Swap (I won't even get into the Freudian implications here), which was set to air in the near future. It is now evident that this was all a publicity stunt, but how far does it go? Were the producers involved? Was ABC involved? I think it goes without saying that the reporters and media themselves were complicit to the extent that they did not bother to do any actual investigating, but rather were relishing in their sensational story about a boy that floated away, as though it was from a children's book.
As an aside, I don't know if anyone else felt like this, but if you knew that this whole thing was a hoax from the get-go, didn't you sort of feel like Bruce Willis from 13 Monkeys?
My picture went to the wrong spot in the post, and quite honestly, I should be doing real work instead of troubleshooting it.
It started with Fox News, but has permeated all of the news media industry While interviewed on CNN, the reporter doing the interview almost tries to avoid even following up on the child's statement that they "did it for the show". The gatekeepers are asleep at the wheel, folks. It looks like it's just us now.
