In his “we were fooled” speech yesterday, now-temporarily famous Larimer County, Colorado, Sheriff Jim Alderman said his team is investigating the possibility “that … some of the media outlets may have had some knowledge about this.” Documents, presumably found in the Heene home, show that one outlet offered money in connection with the balloon incident, but it’s not yet clear whether it was before or after the hoax occurred. It’s perfectly conceivable that outlets were scrambling to be the first to buy the rights to this story once Falcon was “found” “sleeping” “in a box in the attic,” but there are probably plenty of media companies shady enough to have conspired on the whole hoax. For example: those reality-TV-show production companies to whom networks (like ABC, with Wife Swap) and cable channels (like VH1, with that Megan Wants a Murderer show) outsource their casting and common sense. Though, also, at one point in this saga, we heard Richard Heene refer to the network who did Wife Swap as “CBS, I guess,” which was odd, but we wouldn’t put it past Heene to forget the name of the network that got him closest to fame. He’d had a long couple of days.
