Balloon Boy’s Flight a Major Success
Author: DavidJones // Category: Ethics, Family, Pop Culture
By now we’ve all heard about Balloon Boy. Every station is playing the story…over and over and over and over. When new details emerge, we hear those over and over and over and over.
Despite the story being a hoax, somewhere the crazy family behind the fiasco has to be smiling.
They did this for a publicity stunt. What has happened? They got publicity! Even though the story sounded fishy to begin with, the media jumped all over it. They were being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer before the smoke had even settled.
However, thanks to that interview, we now have valuable information that says the story was made up.
But for that family, you can’t buy this kind of publicity. Their appearances on Wifeswap didn’t generate a fraction of this. This morning, Mike Glenn, the Senior Pastor at Brentwood Baptist in Nashville, TN wrote on Twitter: I know it says a lot the Balloon family went to extremes to get their fifteen minutes. What does it say about us that we gave it to them?
Pastor Glenn is exactly right! We’ve made these people celebrities. At first they had our pity, then they had our shame, and honestly now they’re back to having our pity again, just in a different sort of way.
We love our celebrities and wanna be celebrities, don’t we? It doesn’t matter if they’re pure, true, crooked, crazy, or deceiving. As long as they stir up some sort of emotion in us, we either love them or love to hate them.
Tags: Balloon Boy, Brentwood Baptist, Celebrities, CNN, Mike Glenn, Wifeswap, Wolf Blitzer