After blogging last week about Balloon Boy, I was disheartened (but not surprised) to learn that the sheriff now says the whole story was a hoax. The poor kid became physically ill on live television, watching his parents continue with what investigators say was a lie. But it’s a good life lesson. If you mislead others, it never ends well. The sheriff now says the Heenes likely conjured up this story all for publicity and financial gain. Now they’re looking at possible prison time. To heck with the havoc it creates for others, the sheriff says these people were only interested in their own reality show. That’s the ironic part. These so-called reality shows have become the opposite of reality. I’ve given up watching these reality shows, because it’s so obvious the situations are created just for the camera. Let’s face it, most of our lives would be pretty boring as a TV show. So the producers step in to spice things up.
As a reporter I have covered several missing child stories which ended up being not what they originally seemed. One of them happened in Lexington, Kentucky. A family reported that their child never came home at night. Police put out an alert about a possible child abduction. So early the next morning, I was one of three television reporters standing outside the apartment building at 6 am reporting live from the scene, and urging the public to help find this 12 year old girl. Police and sheriff’s deputies spent the entire night searching the area. Then I did another live report at noon, again giving a detailed description of the missing girl. Then around 12:30, the girl just casually walked past all the reporters and into the apartment building. We all looked at each other, wondering “is that the missing girl?” I knocked on the apartment door, and this very adult-like 12-year-old told her family she would be right back. She stepped out into the hallway and informed me that she had spent the night a male friend’s house playing video games. She’d been in the apartment complex the whole time. A police officer had even knocked on the door and she’d hidden in the closet. So after seeing all the police and media looking for her, she stayed hidden away in his apartment because she was embarrassed by the ruckus she had caused. This was a 12-year-old girl! We’d all been misled by a tween! Each time something like this happens, we lose a little more trust in our fellow man. A little bit more of our innocence. Now when someone calls the newsroom asking for our help in finding a missing person, we must ask if the police are involved. Do the police believe this is truly a missing person? We don’t want to be deceived again. Thanks to the Balloon Boy’s family, that tough layer of skepticism just grew a bit thicker.
