SHAPIRO: You often write about how politicians manipulate the media to achieve their ends. The Balloon Boy instance seems like one good example of lay people, civilians, learning to manipulate the media in exactly the same way. Mr. KURTZ: Although I don't know that I'd call Richard Heene a complete civilian in this regard, since he had been on �Wife Swap� and clearly was sort of - had this very strong urge to be on television again. Boy, he got his wish, although not perhaps in the way that he had imagined. But, you know, he obviously was clever enough to figure out that if he concocted this story and he sent this balloon up in the air, and, you know, it was - the pictures were very compelling, that everybody in the world would go live with it. Now, I'm not going to come down too hard on the Audio & video cable networks in this particular instance. I have criticized them for falling for the runaway bride story and numerous other instances where we kind of shot first and asked questions later. But the authorities in Colorado were taking this seriously. They had what they considered to be a criminal report that there was or might be a kid aboard, and I've got to tell you, I was in two different offices during those two heart-wrenching hours, and everybody was gathered around the TV watching this. It would have been awfully hard for any producer, for any television executive to say, you know what? We don't have all the facts here. Let's just breakaway and we'll come back when we've got this nailed down. So I cut them a little slack during those two hours, although not afterward. SHAPIRO: Right. So afterward, the balloon landed, the boy was not in it and rather than saying hey, what these people want is media attention, let's go someplace else, everyone was fighting to have the family on the air. Mr. KURTZ: Especially once we learned - because it was a couple more hours before we learned, you know, had the kid fallen out, where was he, that he had never left the house in Colorado. At that point, you know, you could just hear the journalistic adrenaline flowing because we had had what seemed to be a dramatic kind of happy-ending story because nobody was killed. And now it was like, why did they do this? What's their motivation? Let's send bookers to their home. And so suddenly, you know, a few hours after supposedly learning that their six-year-old son was alive, the Heene family is sitting in front of the cameras, first on �Larry King Live� and then, you know, what was 5 o'clock in the morning Colorado time the next morning doing the CBS, ABC, NBC. And the most sickening thing here - and I'm sure most of your listeners have seen this - was watching this poor kid, who obviously had been put up to this by the parents, you know, throw up first on �Good Morning America� and then on the �Today Show.� I mean, you couldn't ask for a more dramatic rendering of why this was wrong, and it made me feel sick to my stomach that all these shows were rushing to exploit this story when it was no longer life-and-death story. It was just a story about weird people who do weird things. SHAPIRO: Let's take a caller. We have Anne(ph) from eastern Massachusetts on the phone. Hi, Anne. ANNE (Caller): Hi. I wanted to get your guest's take on the Charles Stuart hoax in Boston, which actually took place a little bit before on the explosion of cable news. In 1990, Charles Stuart called state police on his car phone and said he and his pregnant wife had been shot - robbed and shot by an unidentified black man who was waiting for them in their car. And come to find out, you know, the whole thing was a hoax, even though all of Boston kind of shut down as people looked for this unidentified black man. And then six weeks later Charles Stuart jumped to his death after he found out his brother was going to go to police and talk about his complicity in this particular event. So� SHAPIRO: Howard Kurtz, you're familiar with this case.
It sounds like� Mr. KURTZ: I happen to be familiar with it, because it was featured in one of the books I've written. And so that was very different, because that story was driven by the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. It was, I mean, there was still CNN, but it was not the era of local tabloid crime stories going national, as is so common today - another thing I'm critical of, by the way.
But there, the difference between this and the balloon saga, for example, is that you had the police and you had prosecutors leaking night and day, it seemed like, the notion that there was some unidentified black man who had killed this poor woman who - and that was the account that Charles Stuart had given, as well.