Virtually everyone in the country is railing against Richard Heene for what apparently was a hoax involving his 6 year old son Falcon. By any reasonable standard, this dad is a disgrace. His family is dysfunctional, his wife clearly needs rescuing and I expect child services to be knocking on the family's door pretty soon looking for those kids.

But, there is something else that needs to be looked at in all this. Imagine how easy it was for this crackpot, attention-craved, wannabe scientist Richard Heene to get virtually all of us in the media to put up this ridiculous video of a helium filled balloon for more than two hours under the banner of "BREAKING NEWS."

There was no news here. We had no real information about this boy. It was just a claim by the dad that his son was likely to have been in some cardboard contraption on the bottom of the balloon floating hundreds of feet above the ground at breakneck speed across dozens of miles of Colorado. No proof. No substantiation. Nothing. Just some guy looking to get a reality show about himself and his family by making up some story and releasing this oddball floating device. All he needed was a visual, some fake drama about his son, a cable news industry looking for a story, and an implied understanding that once one network started carrying the balloon visual, everyone else would jump on board.

When will we, in the media, learn? How many more times will we be accomplices for the Richard Heene's of the world? We get duped and duped again, and then we act shocked when it happens the next time. We act as if someone has violated our sense of journalistic integrity when all they've really done is provided us with what we are addicted to—an alleged story that we think will draw eyeballs to our station. It's like we are crack addicts and somebody offers us some free crack and we get mad at them for giving us what we want, what we crave, what we must have.

I say, next time some screwball like Richard Heene pulls something like this, why don't we reserve judgment, hold back just a little bit, use some discretion, have some journalistic integrity and not just do it because we are convinced our competitor is running the same visual with the same non-news information at the bottom of the screen under the banner "Breaking News." Yes, Heene may have been involved in a felony, but the vast majority of the decision makers and gate keepers in the cable news industry are guilty of being lazy, sloppy, and way too hasty. Think anything will be done about it anytime soon? Don't count on it. That's the way it is with addictions. Until you admit you are powerless over it, you don't even stand a chance.

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