Balloon Boy Hoax

The Heene family appeared on a popular reality show called Wife Swap about a year ago. The father, Richard, is some kind of scientist who works on inventions all the time. He and his wife have been said to sleep in their clothes in case they need to jump out of bed to chase a storm. They have three boys, the youngest one, named Falcon, being 6 yrs old. Here is a link to the story in case you aren't familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_balloon_incident. The most recent news says that the parents are pleading guilty to the charges against them and that the prosecutor is recommending probation. Jim Watkins, a news anchor, wrote a pretty strongly worded article in regards to the exploitation of the children called Falcon's Aftermath: The Danger Was on the Ground. You can find it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-watkins/falcons-aftermath-the-dan_b_324442.html. This situation pertains to so many of the things we've been discussing in our class so far. For instance, the impact that the news has on how we perceive and feel about things, what they report, and how they report it. Originally, the only information anybody had was one of the boys brother's saying that he saw him climb into the balloon. This country obviously loves reality TV and I would argue that the news has turned into just that. We get what we ask for I think. Based on ratings, they know exactly what to give us and they won't change it until we ask them to. I believe it to be pretty individualistic, among other things, to pull a stunt like this without considering the consequences that may effect their own children and the society around them. What impression have these people gotten that they think nothing will happen as a result of this except that it might better their chances at the reality TV show they had previously pitched to the same network responsible for Jon and Kate + Eight. I think these kids should have some rights to their own autonomy. I know it's hard to define exactly what that means for a child but I really do think that their is something wrong with having the right to subject your kids to reality TV, hoax's to get the attention of the media, and maybe even acting in general. I don't know where to even begin to draw the line though. I would propose a study to map the effects of exploiting kids in the media except that it would completely contradict my notion that children should have some rights because it would have to be done over a long period of time in which several different families were involved in different types of media. There's obviously some idea of what parent's have the right to subject their own children to. We can decide to include them in media entertainment but we can't sell them, send them to work in factories, or beat them. My point is, how do we know what damages are/are not caused by or correlated with, the entertainment industry? Young Falcon reportedly vomited on the sets of both Today and Good Morning America.