Balloon Boy Is What's Wrong With Cable News

Backed off when judge ruled family couldn't profit from hoax

(NEWSER) - ABC News was just about to pay the family of "balloon boy" Jason Heene $10,000 for a video of their stunt and an interview before a judge ruled last month that the family couldn't profit from their hoax. "ABC pulled the story because it didn't want the scrutiny," a source told the New York Post . NBC has recently come under heat for "pay-for-play" perks to news sources. More»

Richard Heene says he pleaded guilty to help his wife

(NEWSER) - There's no easy way to break this: The balloon boy dad is back in the news, and he insists the hoax he admitted to perpetrating wasn't, in fact, a hoax. Richard Heene tells Larry King in an interview airing Friday that he genuinely thought his son Falcon was aboard the infamous contraption when it took flight. He says he pleaded guilty only to save his wife from being deported to Japan. The local sheriff says he's "shocked" by the interview. More»

Not surprisingly, Nadya Suleman and the Gosselins make the list

(NEWSER) - 2009 will always be the year we first met Octomom, Jon and Kate’s divorce played out in the tabloids, and David Hasselhoff ruined Thanksgiving. And those aren’t the only bad parents of the year—the New York Daily News remembers the worst:

• Richard and Mayumi Heene: Convinced the world son Falcon was trapped in a runaway balloon—and then made him and his siblings lie about it.
• Courtney Love: Ranted about daughter Frances Bean Cobain on Facebook after losing custody.

He's the 'inevitable product' of our era

(NEWSER) - A little sympathy for the Balloon Boy dad, please. Yes, he "grotesquely" put his kids through hell, but he’s also a fitting emblem—and the “inevitable product”—of our time, writes Frank Rich. Richard Heene gave us a fake spectacle that reflects our era much as “War of the Worlds” did on the eve of WWII. It's not his fault we live in an age in which “news, reality television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled, and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking.” More»

More bizarre background on 'Balloon Boy' dad Richard Heene comes out

(NEWSER) - Richard Heene’s totally sensible motivation for his balloon hoax: He “believes the world is going to end in 2012," explained a lawyer for one of Heene’s researchers, who police recently interviewed. "Because of that he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground, where he can be safe from the sun exploding,” the Telegraph reports. More on Heene: More»