No doubt news headlines across the nation will soon read something like 'Balloon boy story pops!' and as I watch and listen, I remember an unpublished letter sent to The Gleaner in July, one that with a little editing and updating should be submitted again.

A careful scrutiny of the news media's recent efforts certainly reveals that a major flaw in news presentation lies not only in getting the facts right, and as we all know "the devil is in the details", but that a growing emphasis on entertainment rather than information and on sensationalism rather than significance may be destroying society's moral structures and corrupting its loftier goals.

Not-so-clever hoax

It certainly seems to have done so for that now infamous, former 'reality show' family in the Midwestern US this past week, while in that same regard, the news media, rather than be clear, insightful and thorough in reporting their story, were in fact complicit in the perpetration of a not-so-clever hoax.

Yet no specific example is really needed here. It is simply an observation that bespeaks of something that most of us are more than familiar with and many of us to our great dismay.

Entertainment

One minute we watch a report about an event in world affairs among government leaders and the next, we see the story of one, largely unknown individual's tragic fate. One hour we concern ourselves with the soaring cost of a basic commodity or service and the next with some strange individual's altercation with police in a small town. One day we are preoccupied with a coming, state or national, public election, for example, and the next with what a reality-show star will do during his or her next series of performances, whether public or private.

Reality itself, for many, has apparently become little more than the period between advertisements and a husband, obviously starved for more entertainment, looks up from his computer and asks his also works-at-home wife to "turn it over to the news, honey. I want to know what happened to that little boy in the balloon!"

I am, etc.,

ED MCCOY

mmhobo48@juno.com

Bokeelia, Florida