It's a TV thing. It's another thing too. At regular intervals something scuzzy and cringe-inducing emerges from the television-centric popular culture in the United States and screams out for attention. That attention usually involves high-volume tut-tutting. This is one of those things.

It's also one of those incidents that reveal something deeper than what's on the surface.

The tut-tutting is easily done but redundant. Cable news cannels went crazy for the runaway Balloon Boy story when they should have been covering events in Pakistan, Afghanistan and U.S. President Barack Obama's health-care plans. Yadda yadda.

Of course U.S. cable TV news channels are going to indulge in the visually arresting balloon story and the terror-inducing tale of a small boy in terrible danger. Anybody would be gripped by it. It's human nature.

It is very easy to complain that U.S. cable news coverage goes overboard with this sort of story on a regular basis. The kid trapped down a well. The missing blond teenage girl. The kitty cat that plays the piano on YouTube. Big deal. The interest in these narratives is as old as storytelling itself. Cinderella stories. Little Red Riding Hood meets the wolf stories. Me, I'll watch a cute kitty story any old time. I'll get my news about events in Pakistan from the paper, later.

So let that be the first lesson on the Balloon Boy boondoggle - it's a waste of time to find fault with U.S. cable TV news channels. Any moral indignation is misplaced. Human-interest stories will trump politics and policy stories every time.

Doyle noted that a key element in the hoax was the use of one of the Heene children:

What the Heenes did was despicable. A child was ruthlessly exploited and, obviously, a nervous wreck as dad Richard Heene tried to manipulate the media and achieve the fame he so pathetically desires. At the same time, what Heene did was to understand the narrative thrust that the U.S. media and the audiences adore. A kid in jeopardy. The visual oomph of the drifting balloon.

Crosbie's take was more about the nature of fame in our new media age, which she says started with the rescue of tot Jessica McLure from a Texas well in 1987:

When most of us were children, we could have built a Mylar spaceship, launched it off the roof, gotten it tangled in a tree and been attacked by wild dogs before limping home with a broken limb, and no one would have noticed.

But ever since little Jessica McClure fell into a Midland, Tex., well in 1987 and CNN, a green, ambitious news channel, followed every second of this drama, we have been looking at each other differently.

Not the way we look at each other on the street, or in a mall or at work, but the way we look at people on the street, or in a mall or at work if they were holding a transparent square over themselves.

After the McClure incident, the philosophical essence of that old Warhol canard changed: It is not that people, as the artist would have liked, are increasingly deserving of fame. It is that the nature of fame changed the moment we all, tacitly, decided that fame involves only watching and being watched. What used to be the purview of the Peeping Tom and stalker is now our very large terrain, as we stare, scrutinize and survey each other like CIA operatives. ...

If the Balloon Boy story is merely the story of a cruel hoax (cruel to the child, hiding in a box in his family attic; cruel to our so-rarely hopeful hearts), it is also an object lesson in how quickly the world can now seize on an incident and stream it through stationary and mobile devices so quickly, we may as well be travelling through time and space.

Here's a question those writers didn't address: Is Canada's culture more or less prone to producing hoaxes such as Balloon Boy?

Our media certainly covered the balloon escape as much as anybody (I work for CTV.ca News; CTV News has a cable channel, CTV News Channel, that lives for breaking news events), and I suspect Canadians followed the initial story intensely.

But I really think America has a much more obsessive relationship with fame than Canada does. As I tweeted earlier this week, in the U.S., if you're not a somebody, you're a nobody.

And to be a somebody, you have to be seen to be a somebody, which means the media has to notice you.

This will invariably lead to despicable behaviour by a few. And maybe I'm being a bit of a homer, but I don't think that pathological need for fame is as deeply embedded in this country's culture.