The saga of "Balloon Boy" (or Falcon Heene, as he's known to his new friends at the Larimer Co., Colo., sheriff's office) proved irresistible to the media last Thursday — especially the 24-hour cable news channels, which went into commercial-free crisis mode for more than an hour.There was no way NPR would have covered it like that on the air, or could have: The medium was the message. The images of that silver mylar balloon shooting across the sky were transfixing. They came from a local news helicopter — ginned up, apparently, by the phone call of Falcon's own father, Richard Heene, to the newsroom of a local television station shortly after the balloon's release to the sky.
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