News is getting way too excited about this balloon guy. He attached balloons to a chair and intended to skydive into the Calgary Stampede or something - I can't be bothered to pay attention. But news organizations are loving to use it to fill space and time.
There are plenty of reasons why: It's unusual, it presents a nice visual, it ties in with the movie Up. And here in Canada, it's local content. Plus it's a difficult time for news in general, since it's hard to make the Greece story intelligible or interesting, while Canadian news just keeps reporting on forest fires.
But even modern media has some ethics, and this was a very thinly-veiled publicity stunt. Usually sports broadcasters have a policy not to show spectators who run on the field, and that's essentially what this is. No, it's worse than that, it's essentially a less-clever version of that Fan Man guy who crashed (literally) a boxing match in 1993.
And while we're talking about being less-clever, this is the YouTube age, and our bar for being impressed by stunts is pretty high. Just using lots of balloons to perform a stunt that didn't really work hardly seems notable any more.
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