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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2009
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 OPINION 
17

Balloon Boy Is What's Wrong With Cable News

Popular stories don't need to take up 100% of channels' airtime

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(Newser) – The "balloon boy" non-story was just the latest example of how ridiculous cable news has become, writes Alan Sepinwall. With a war raging in Afghanistan, a jobless “recovery,” and a complex ongoing health care debate, the "news" networks spend hours on nothing at all. The problem is in the model: Producers have tons of airtime to fill and are so desperate to keep viewers tuned in they don’t dare deviate from the day’s big story, even when there’s nothing to talk about.

So in the natural gaps as the story developed, we got reports on bizarre details in the balloon family's life: their appearance on Wife Swap, their loony science experiments. "Here's an idea,” Sepinwall proposes in the Star-Ledger: “When you're covering a news story and there are, for the moment, no new pieces of information to discuss, stop covering the story for a little while.”

Six-year-old Falcon Heene sits cross-legged on the roof of his family's van outside his home in Fort Collins, Colo., after the little boy was found hiding in a box on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009.
Six-year-old Falcon Heene sits cross-legged on the roof of his family's van outside his home in Fort Collins, Colo., after the little boy was found hiding in a box on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009.   (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In this image rendered from video and released by KMGH-TV in Denver, a homemade balloon aircraft is seen after it landed in a Colorado field near Ft. Collins Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009.
In this image rendered from video and released by KMGH-TV in Denver, a homemade balloon aircraft is seen after it landed in a Colorado field near Ft. Collins Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009.   (AP Photo/KMGH-TV)
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It's okay. Really. Go back to the many, many, many other things happening in America and around the world on any given day. Do a picture-in-picture if you want, so you still have a Balloon Boy image on the screen.
- Alan Sepinwall

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17 comments
VIEWING:
 
aprilfool
Oct 16, 09 1:58 PM CDT
If covering balloon boy is so bad (which it is), then what is covering covering balloon boy? Reply
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+16
IN RESPONSE:
foodchain11
Oct 16, 09 3:01 PM CDT
HOpefully it creates an opportunity to tell them just how awful this was. I turned them off as soon as they started.
Vote up! Vote down!
+4
IN RESPONSE:
Fondue
Oct 16, 09 3:18 PM CDT
LOL april - right on foodchain.
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0
DJM420
Oct 16, 09 1:59 PM CDT
yet one more reason to save the 100 or so dollars and cancel that crap Reply
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0
Reader83540559
Oct 16, 09 2:08 PM CDT
When we watch cheap news that's what we get cheap news. Reply
Vote up! Vote down!
+5

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