Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oct. 20: Tom Wolfe, the novelist who so well captured modern mores of 1980s American society in “Bonfire of the Vanities” and the 1990s in “A Man in Full,” probably shouldn’t try to write a book to define this decade: The unfolding balloon boy saga says so much about us already.

On the surface it’s a story about media, money and a degree of madness – and the damage done to the children of Richard and Mayumi Heene. But the mess also tells us something about the broader American family, which is so easily distracted from the issues that truly impact the country and the world.

The narcotic of fame is the dynamic that has generated the genre most popular on the nation’s airwaves: reality TV. What started with “Survivor” and “American Idol” has spun off into subgenres of relationship reality like ABC’s “The Bachelor” and even celebrity reality like NBC’s “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!”…

Increasingly, reality shows involve infants, toddlers and grade-schoolers who aren’t empowered or haven’t developed the ability to say no to being exploited for TV profit. …

Popular culture will always have characters like Richard Heene, Jon Gosselin and Nadya Suleman, the “Octomom” who soon will have an exploitative reality show all her own. And as long as there are willing contestants – and viewers – reality TV will flourish. The low cost and high ratings are media manna for TV networks.

But the line should clearly stop at exploiting kids, whose lives can be forever damaged when they’re used as pawns by their celebrity-crazed parents. …

Los Angeles Times, Oct. 18: How’s this for a reality show concept? Call it “Schemers”: A man and woman fall in love – with fame, that is. They waste scads of taxpayer dollars and scare the daylights out of the public by telling police that their propitiously named son, Falcon, is soaring off in a wayward balloon. Except he was never in the balloon at all. What a laugh riot!

You’ll recognize this, no doubt, as the plot of the true-life story that unfolded last week. The money moment came during that family interview on CNN when 6-year-old Falcon Heene, who it turns out might be more grounded in reality than his parents, responded to questions about why he had hidden in the garage by telling his dad, “You said we did this for a show.” Father Richard sighed “Hmm.” Mom Mayumi paused for a moment and said “No.” Kids say the darndest things, don’t they? …