The New Republic embarrasses itself yet again
by Pete on October 25, 2009
The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner takes a shot at Frank Rich:
Frank Rich, today:
It would also be nice to think that the “balloon boy” viewers were the innocent victims of a dazzling Houdini-class feat of wizardry — a “massive fraud,” as Bill O’Reilly thundered. But even slightly jaundiced onlookers might have questioned how a balloon could waft buoyantly through the skies for hours with a 6-year-old boy hidden within its contours. That so few did is an indication of how practiced we are at suspending disbelief when watching anything labeled news, whether the subject is W.M.D.’s in Iraq or celebrity gossip in Hollywood.
Really? Maybe the reason that so few of us questioned the balloon’s “waft” was that no one knows anything about balloons. As for Rich’s last comment about Hollywood gossip, well, he can speak for himself. I suppose when your beat consists of drawing overly broad generalizations between pop culture and politics this tendency becomes more pronounced.
That’s pretty rich, coming from a magazine that fell hook, line, and sinker for the Bush administration’s ever-changing rationale for invading Iraq.
That a lot of people will mindlessly fall in step with whatever story the media is hyping is precisely the point that Rich is making. Chotiner’s protestations aside, one needed to know exactly nothing about balloons to understand that from the second the “balloon boy” story broke out on the news channels and Internet like a rash until it ended, there was zero evidence that the kid was in the balloon. Nonetheless, news anchors breathlessly reported every development throughout the afternoon, and Twitter was overrun with “balloon boy”-related tweets and re-tweets.
Rather than knowledge about balloons, what was actually required here were critical thinking skills. And to Rich’s point, these same skills would have served a lot of people well, whether the topic at hand be the balloon boy, Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda ties, or mortgage-backed securities that can never ever decrease in value.
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