The unbearable lightness of the Balloon coverage By Jon Allsop | |
“Are Twitter’s birthday balloons broken?” “Weather grounds balloons Sunday morning, 2023 Hudson Hot Air Affair still a success.” “Release of balloons would be banned under new Florida bill.”
Across the US, various balloons have been in the news in recent days,
cropping up in stories about, for instance, the perceived mirthlessness
of Elon Musk and the wellbeing of sea turtles. But recent headlines have
been dominated by one balloon, in particular—to the extent that, as
sometimes happens with otherwise common words in news coverage, it
picked up a definite article and shed associated adjectives, becoming
simply “The Balloon.” (See also:
“The Queue” that formed in London after the death of the Queen.) In
case you were living under a rock last week, I’m referring to the
suspected Chinese spy balloon that floated from West to East over the
US, sparking a diplomatic ruckus and capturing the attention of a
nation. (Incidentally, if you were living under a rock last week,
congrats: you were safe from The Balloon. Probably.) The US news media’s first recorded sighting of The Ballon (that I can find, anyway) came last Wednesday, when Larry Mayer of the Billings Gazette, a local newspaper in Montana, photographed it as it appeared in the sky over that state.
At that point, Mayer didn’t know what he was photographing. President
Biden had already been briefed on The Balloon but his administration had
decided not to go public with the sighting just yet; that changed on
Thursday, when the Gazette published Mayer’s photo and it became, as Bloomberg put it, “only a matter of time until national media would pick up on the report.” (Not
that the national media has a good recent track record of picking up
local news stories about mystifying objects full of hot air,
but I digress.) The confirmation of The Balloon triggered a chain
reaction of diplomatic consequences: Chinese officials claimed that it
was a meteorological balloon that had been blown off course; no one in
the US really bought this, not least Antony Blinken, the secretary of
state, who canceled a forthcoming trip to China. It also triggered loud
outrage in right-wing political and media circles. (Indeed, per Bloomberg,
the outrage was a big part of the reason that Blinken scrapped his
China trip.) “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON,” Donald Trump yelled into Truth
Social. “POP THIS BALLOON!” the front page of the New York Post demanded. | |
The
Biden administration may eventually have gone public with the news of
The Balloon, but beyond that—and the insistence that The Balloon did not
pose any immediate military threat—officials did not disclose much. At a press briefing on Friday,
which CNN carried live, Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesperson, mostly
declined to elaborate as reporters peppered him with questions. “Can you
confirm, the photos that are out there, that this is not the Man in the
Moon and that is the actual balloon?” one journalist asked. “I’m
certainly aware of photos being posted online,” Ryder responded, with an admirably straight face.
“I’m not going to get into the business of confirming where those
photos come from.” Another reporter asked if the location of The Balloon
was classified; Ryder acknowledged that “the public certainly has the
ability to look up in the sky and see where the balloon is,” but
declined to tell people where to look. “We’re just not going to get into
an hour-by-hour where the balloon is,” Ryder added. Meanwhile,
cable news was palpably desperate to get into an hour-by-hour of where
The Balloon was. At times, the coverage evoked that of the OJ Bronco
chase, if the Bronco had been sensitive to changing wind dynamics and
the pundits invited on air to talk about it had had military medals
strapped to their chests; more directly, it recalled coverage of the
“Balloon Boy” incident of 2009, when a balloon that was said to have a
child inside, but actually did not, drifted over Colorado. The spy
Balloon was “the perfect story for American cable TV,” Jeremy Goldkorn,
the editor in chief of theChina Project, noted on Friday—because,
in addition to being something mysterious moving through space, “it's
from China, it’s got spy cameras, and it full of hot air or happy gas.
This is going to go on for days.” As it happened, The Balloon, if not
the media hubbub around it, met its end on Saturday, when the Pentagon
finally took the advice of the New York Post and shot it down, over the Atlantic. Major networks had hours of special coverage. “Our long national nightmare is over,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur said. “We got The Balloon.” Actually, Tur didn’t say this—the comedian Chloe Fineman did, in character as Tur on Saturday Night Live.
Fineman-as-Tur interviewed Kenan Thompson in character as General
William Hamilton (“The Balloon was somehow able to get past our West
Coast anti-balloon defense system: the Seattle Space Needle”), and then
interviewed Bowen Yang in character as The Balloon itself, bobbing
around with water wings in a CGI sea. “I entertain you guys for four
days and then get shot by Biden?” Yang/The Balloon said, incredulously.
“Everyone’s being surveilled constantly, but it’s always Shoot the balloon and never Unplug Alexa. If you care so much about your data, why do you all keep your bank passwords in the Notes app?” We
live in an age in which the boundaries between satire and real news
often seem to blur—a function, no doubt, of the timeless value of satire
in skewering our political condition, but also, probably, of mass media
collapsing the distance between news consumers and the world around us,
putting it right before our eyes in all its absurdity. The Balloon
encapsulated this dynamic better than any other recent news story that I
can remember. Journalists sometimes acted as if they were in on the
joke, raising eyebrows and stuffing their copy with puns, even though
(as SNL made explicit) they often felt like the butt of one. The whole
story had a sheen of farce. “The balloon story feels warm and reassuring
to me,” The Economist’s Mike Bird wrote on Twitter. “It's been a while since we've had an international news story that's inherently silly.” And yet this inherent silliness, while undeniable, was tangled up together with an inherent seriousness,
itself wired into weighty questions of geopolitics. If the story played
to our human impulse to follow mysterious stuff across the sky, it also
tapped into much darker impulses, especially—though by no means
exclusively—as it was covered in right-wing media. The key question as
to whether the facts justified all the hype got a bit lost in, well, all
the hype. At least some prominent observers didn’t think so. “Hourly
news reports make it sound like a replay of Pearl Harbor,” the
national-security reporter Jeff Stein wrote in his newsletter, Spy Talk,
but Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, told him that, “really, it’s
not a big deal.” Others—not least Bowen Yang, crossing that porous
news-satire line again—noted the relative insignificance of The Balloon compared to the electronic privacy violations of which Chinese officials are capable. Wherever The Balloon slots into it, the story of Chinese surveillance and espionage, which has attracted some dogged recent investigative journalism,
is undoubtedly important. So, too, is the much broader story of
US-China tensions, which is deeply serious and which, rightly, infused
coverage of The Balloon to a significant extent, even if The Balloon
itself need not necessarily have attracted such significant coverage.
This bigger story, however, has also been pumped full of a lot of hot
air—not to mention greatly more harmful and insidious rhetoric—of the
political variety. The press has a responsibility to cover it
unflinchingly, but also carefully and proportionately, and not to
privilege empty outrage-mongering or whatever makes the best TV. As Ben
Rhodes, a former top foreign-policy official in the Obama White House, put it,
“the US political and media response to this balloon is not a
particularly good sign for rational decision making on China in the
years to come.” Over the weekend, Katie Rogers, of the New York Times, wrote that The
Balloon “briefly called us back to the early days of collective
social-media viewing, when it was still novel to watch something bizarre
unfold on television alongside a cascade of tweets and cackle-inducing
memes.” Those early days coincided with a geopolitical moment that was
very different to the “new Cold War” atmosphere prevalent in much
modern-day media coverage. Cable news was around
at the end of the last Cold War, though it was in a relative state of
infancy. Even then, it was obvious that the ways we consume—and
cover—stories about great-power competition can, ultimately, shape the
terms of that competition itself, and we have a responsibility, at
least, to keep that in mind as this new era moves forward. We do not
have to be balloons against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past. |