My column in this week’s print TIME is the last word on the Balloon Boy saga—”last word” in the sense that I’m pretty sure every other person in America has weighed in on the subject by now. I look at Richard Heene’s reported fixation on getting a reality show and the culture of TV fame that it reflects:
Modern media did not invent greed, eccentricity or lust for attention. What they did was monetize them. There have long been odd families and obscure men pursuing bizarre theories and cobbling together flying machines in their backyards. But only in the reality-TV era has unstable behavior become a valid career choice. Only now are questionable parenting decisions the stuff of a lucrative family business. Say whatever you want about Jon and Kate Gosselin, their divorce proceedings entail numbers with a lot more zeroes than your typical young Pennsylvania family encounters. …