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"Richard Heene finally has found the fame he craved," declared ABC's Ryan Owens," but the wannabe reality star has lost control of this script." All three newscasts had correspondents in Fort Collins to cover the mounting evidence that the Heene family planned to hoax the cable TV news networks by claiming that the six-year-old Falcon was a castaway in the untethered helium balloon that soared over the Colorado countryside on Thursday.
The cable TV news networks were certainly fooled. Yet was it indeed a preplanned conspiracy? CBS' Dean Reynolds reminded us of the apparent confession from the boy's lips in response to CNN's Wolf Blitzer: "We did it for the show." NBC's Lee Cowan reported that the RDF production company in Santa Monica "admits it at one time had a reality show in development with the Heenes." ABC's Owens was told by police detectives that "they found e-mails and documents that detailed the plot, all to pretend their six-year-old floated away." CBS' Reynolds reported that a 25-year-old researcher had sold his story to gawker.com that "he and Heene drew up a master plan earlier this year to generate a massive media frenzy using a weather balloon."
All this seems beside the point. Journalists have a greater duty to inquire into why their own profession allowed itself to be fooled by the hoax than they do to cover the police investigation of the suspected hoaxer. If the cable TV news channels were not so gullible, all the plotting in the world by Heene would have been to no avail.
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