Balloon Dad Heene Gets 90 Days

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»

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.

Guilty pleas for Heenes will likely carry sentence of probation

(NEWSER) - Richard and Mayumi Heene will plead guilty tomorrow for lying to police and rescuers and sending them on a wild balloon chase for their “missing” son Falcon, who they knew was safe at home. Mayumi will cop to false reporting, a misdemeanor, while Richard will plead guilty to attempting to influence a public servant, a felony. Both are expected to get off with probation, MSNBC reports. More»

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»

(NEWSER) - Just about everyone seems to hate Richard Heene, but the emotion just proves how powerfully the balloon boy hoax gripped our collective imagination. “Had Richard called 911 and reported that he’d last seen his son near a Greyhound bus station, almost nobody would have cared,” writes Brandon Keim for True/Slant. But balloons still hold a thrill. More»