Defending the ‘Balloon Boy’ hoax: Michael Wolff goes there
Just this morning I was wondering aloud in the office who would stick up for Richard Heene’s plan with his wife Mayumi to manufacture themselves a reality TV show by making it look like their 6-year-old son Falcon had drifted away in a balloon. And I have my answer, which I should have known all along: Michael Wolff at Newser:
The balloon people, the Heene family, were merely trying to get their piece of the publicity pie. Publicity is like wealth; if you’ve already gotten it, people take it for granted you deserve it. If you don’t have it and unartfully grab for it, you can seem like a terrible parvenu, as well as emotionally troubled (not that this has hurt the Gosselins).
Of course, in the case of the Heenes, this is not just a publicity stunt, but a hoax. In the many permutations of manufacturing conflict and manipulating people’s attentions, making it up out of whole cloth is rather risky and unprofessional behavior. This is why there is an entire industry devoted to helping you get publicity without it appearing that you are only trying to get publicity. The corrupt and guileful and mendacious against all evidence to the contrary can appear quite straightforward, earnest, sincere, and, even, genuinely wronged. That’s modern alchemy.
The Heenes failed to understand that publicity is not just about drama but about craft and expertise and about being in the publicity club.
The Heenes are just terrible upstarts.
I mean, it isn’t an outright defense. But it is at least a little bit of sympathy for the devil.
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