Not all reality shows stick to the script

Let us count the ways people have made it onto reality TV.

Monica Lewinsky earned a hosting role on "Mr. Personality" after fooling around with the president.

Tonya Harding secured a spot on "Celebrity Boxing" after, among other things, pleading guilty to hindering the investigation of an attack on a figure-skating rival. The Gosselins became reality TV superstars thanks to a hyper-effective fertility treatment.

Maybe it's not all that far-fetched to imagine that an apparent near-brush with disaster that generates a catchy media moniker like "balloon boy" might whet the omnivorous appetite of reality TV producers.

Reality TV trades on attention-grabbing quirks, and is not beyond encouraging their cultivation by a new generation of entrepreneurs of idiosyncrasy. If we can all aspire to be stars of our own shows, it is only one more step to become the producers as well, managing the spectacle for maximum ratings and economic benefit.

Of course, not all shows turn out as planned.

We still do not know whether Falcon Heene's non-brush with disaster was a publicity stunt calculated to boost his family's Q score, but if it was, the hoax angle has only amplified the boom it triggered in the media's echo chamber.

The spectacle was perfectly designed for cable news -- a potential tragedy unfolding in real time at balloon-drift speed to prolong the anticipation and fill air time.

The aftermath, in turn, neatly reinforced the pathologies of a reflexive media culture that obsessively magnifies its fascination with celebrity and sensationalism by treating it as a symptom to be analyzed.

As a suspected hoax, the balloon boy incident suddenly becomes a jumping-off point for titillatingly sober forms of self-critique: "Should reality TV get the blame for inspiring a hoax of this magnitude?" "Are citizens becoming too celebrity obsessed?"

The balloon boy story sprouted a new set of legs that will likely keep it running for some time -- perhaps not the length of a full TV season, but it could get comparable air time if charges are filed and a trial ensues.

The Heenes may not get their reality show payday, but the "news" media will get theirs. Perhaps the indignant tone of so much of the news coverage is to mask this convergence of interests and to pry open a gap between news and entertainment that, at least on cable news, has become indistinguishable at times like these.

Brace yourself for a spate of stories cooked up by editors looking for fresh takes on the balloon boy story and its various cultural implications (we've already seen think pieces on the reliability of the telling verbal slips of 6-year-olds, and whether the balloon was actually big enough to float a child).

And then brace yourself for stories about the media's obsession with the balloon boy and the fact that, as the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism recently noted, the story outstripped coverage of the war in Afghanistan, health care reform, and the economic crisis for much of the week in which it appeared.

We'll hear that more people can identify Falcon Heene than Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee responsible for crafting health care reform. The coverage will shift from critiquing reality TV to critiquing cable news -- both for its sensationalism and triviality.

If experience is anything to go by, the coverage will culminate in meta-stories about how people are sick of balloon-boy stories. Just don't expect the media to start counting, say, the health insurance industry's campaign contributions. They will have enough to do calculating Richard Heene's possible take from his own TV show.

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Mark Andrejevic teaches media studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched."

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