Hacks from almost every news organization in the world were fooled last week by the tall tale of a little boy floating up, up and away on a silver balloon.

The whole incident screamed hoax. It put a missing child, flying saucers and a weather balloon in the same story for God's sake. The (non-) story of Falcon Heen was a little more than a collage of other crazy yarns that have appeared in the press over the years; the Roswell UFOs, the man who disrupted air traffic floating in an armchair suspended by helium balloons, and so on.

Yet every single major media outlet, including the BBC, CNN, Reuters, AP and the New York Times enthusiastically carried it. Footage of the balloon speeding across the desert was repeatedly shown on television. The networks broadcast the search for little Falcon live. Even Xinhua joined the stampede and in turn infected our own China.org.cn. A Google search yesterday showed 9,580 articles on the story.

Surely of the hundreds, possibly thousands of journalists who reproduced the story there must have been many who thought "this is just crazy". What prevented them from telling their editors "I'm just not going to do this?"

Only after little Falcon blurted out, in a CNN interview, "we did this for the show" did anyone bother to do the most minimal check – inevitably a Google search – which revealed his parents as serial self-publicists who had appeared twice on reality TV shows.

By comparison with the nearly 10,000 stories on the balloon boy, only 1300 reported Ban Ki-moon's remark that for the first time more than 1 billion people were going hungry. Cynical hacks might remark this is a battle between a hoax and a factoid but in all seriousness, which is more newsworthy?

The whole incident was a perfect illustration of what UK Guardian journalist Nick Davies calls "churnalism" in his excellent book "Flat Earth News." Squeezed by free content on the Internet and desperate for advertising revenue, news organizations, says Davies, are reduced to recycling material issued by the PR machines of companies, governments, pressure groups and, in this case, publicity-hungry would-be celebs.

Just in case you think the media are more responsible when it comes to "serious" news, Davies gives two frightening examples of herd-like "churnalist" behavior: In the late 1990s, companies and governments were bullied by relentless media hype into paying software consultants hundreds of billions of dollars to fix an entirely mythical "year 2000 Millennium bug". Even more serious was the faithful reproduction of fake intelligence about Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" that led to the 2003 invasion and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Guardian recently reported a sting operation by documentary maker Chris Atkins, who pushed entirely-invented celebrity gossip to the British tabloids. Gossip editors were prepared to pay cash for tall tales about a member of Girls Aloud reading quantum physics books, Amy Winehouse singeing her hair while mending a fuse, and Madonna's ex, Guy Ritchie, having a strange cosmetic procedure called a chemical peel. Ironically, the Guardian was one of those news outlets that dutifully reproduced the balloon boy saga, and is now busy on the follow-up, in which the vindictive and all-too-real American criminal justice system is threatening to lock up Mr and Mrs. Heen for several years and disrupt their children's lives far more than any balloon trip.

The Sheriff investigating the incident, who looks like the sort of solid character who would back up Henry Fonda in High Noon, is also suggesting that some media organizations colluded with the Heens to concoct the story.

News has become something to look at in between Facebook and Twitter, just another part of our postmodern stream of consciousness – an idea we can trace back via William James to Immanuel Kant, who spent years wondering how our minds glue sights, sounds, and smells into a seamless experience of the world.

In the end Kant decided our minds impose order and unity. Time and space are not real, but projected onto the world. So, when I die, time also ends or, as Wittgenstein said, "When I die the world does not change but comes to an end." Probably feeling this was a stretch for some of his readers, he added "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent."

Which brings me back to the idiot media; before the world dies of infotainment overload can we please find some editors who can identify whereof we must be silent.

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