balloon boy

Arianna Huffington likes to blast "the media" for getting distracted by silliness like the Balloon Boy story. But no one's more distracted, or distracting, than her own Huffington Post.

On the afternoon of Oct. 15, the world suddenly became spellbound -- focusing its attention on a shiny, oversized tinfoil popover that supposedly contained a six-year-old named Falcon Heene -- the so-called Balloon Boy. I estimate that the time Americans in the workforce spent watching Balloon Boy...

It was as if the news media had enough and just couldn't take it anymore. After weeks of grinding coverage of the health care debate, bad news from Afghanistan and the bizarre antics of various political leaders, much of the mainstream news media seemed to come unhinged on Thursday afternoon in a...