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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009
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 OPINION 
8

Balloon Boy Another Blow to Trust

Politicians are the ones most lost in forest of fakery

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(Newser) – The Falcon Heene fiasco sums up the dilemma facing a society riddled with fake news, Photoshop fakes, and even fake Rush Limbaugh quotes, writes Daniel Henninger. "Reality TV" is the perfect metaphor for a world where you need to routinely "ask yourself whether what's in front of you is real, sort of real, a hoax or what," Henninger notes in the Wall Street Journal.

Most people have developed a protective shell of cynicism to deal with all this fakery. Henninger writes, but politicians—despite all their spin—are floundering. President Obama's health reform plans became a harder sell than expected not just because of right-wing activism, but because it wasn't pitched well enough to an instinctively skeptical audience.  "We are all balloon boys now," Henninger concludes, "learning every day how to make sure the clever people don't take us for a ride."

The Heene family's hot-air balloon is seen over Colorado.
The Heene family's hot-air balloon is seen over Colorado.   (AP Photo/KMGH-TV)
"The Onion, Jon Stewart or Saturday Night Live end up closer to the truth than the original material," writes Henninger.   (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)
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With fakery everywhere, people's ability to know where things fall on the spectrum between fact and falsity becomes so compromised that they retreat into a shell of cynicism about everything. - Daniel Henninger

Living deep inside this new electronic forest, the human animal has learned to adapt. But the one presumably important area of life that seems to be having a hard time adapting to the reality of pandemic doubt is politics. - Daniel Henninger

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8 comments
VIEWING:
 
DarkFrancis
Oct 22, 09 7:06 AM CDT
With politics it's as simple now as it was many many years ago: don't trust them. They are not there to be trusted. Our role is to be vigilant. The same now applies to the media, which is a terrible state of affairs. Reply
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+2
IN RESPONSE:
Reader64481089
Oct 22, 09 7:08 AM CDT
Yes, but if tomorrow brings a story of another child in danger if given the opportunity to help I would do it once again just on the chance I might help save a child pain. The media seems to reward such behavior on the part of parents and that indeed must stop
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+1
IN RESPONSE:
divetrader
Oct 22, 09 7:17 AM CDT
Reader, did you go into Balloon Boys garage and save him from that box?
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-2
IN RESPONSE:
DarkFrancis
Oct 22, 09 7:30 AM CDT
Reader, the fact that people thought a young boy's life was in danger was not the fault of the people. It was not the fault of the media either. It was genuinely thought that young Falcon had been in that balloon. Only the most cynical among us would watch a story like that unfold and think 'hoax' before the thing had even landed. But it's true that the fourth estate is now, more than ever, engaged in a grand and ugly deception.
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0
IN RESPONSE:
Pragmaticrealism
Oct 22, 09 8:05 AM CDT
I knew the whole thing was a fake as soon as I saw how "huge" of a story it was.
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