So, the day after a sheriff revealed that the balloon boy drama was a hoax, an effort to snag a reality-TV show, how many of you are surprised? (After 25 years in newspapers, not much is really a surprise. However, I never fail to be appalled and disappointed by lies and parents’ bad behavior.)

We’ve been warned for years that news’ and entertainment’s boundaries are becoming increasingly porous.

In fact, 11 years ago “Life: The Movie” by Neal Gabler was a topic for the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival.  (The festival, which begins this year on Nov. 1, will be featured this Sunday in the A&E section.)

In 1998, Gabler documented in detail how Americans now seem to expect their lives to be like movies and how reality and entertainment were intermingling.  We believe life is a show for our amusement, he said.  At that time, he also predicted that that information would be a minor player in the future of the Internet: it’s real use would be entertainment.

From the 1998 interview:

When Pope John Paul II comes to St. Louis in January, he’s booked at the TWA Dome, like a superstar rock musician. “The pope has exploited the theatricality of his office, ” Gabler says. And the large churches that have auditoriums and basketball courts have learned to deploy entertainment in the service of religion.

The stock market boomed on a kind of “fiction of its own momentum.” “There is no relationship between a company’s real value and the stock prices.” 

The Gulf War, covered by TV news with logos and a musical signature, may have been the first war with a theme song.

The mounting of a museum show (think “Angels From the Vatican”) often overshadows the artwork in it. 

This paper’s reporting of Mark McGwire’s record-setting home run has outsold any other edition, including those marking D-Day, the atomic bomb, President Kennedy’s assassination and the first man on the moon. 

McGwire is one of the few extraordinary athletes who actually play out their “life movie” on the field (as opposed to guys like Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley, who are better known for extracurricular antics). The audience rejected Roger Maris (who, Gabler recalls, once refused to sign an autograph for him) because it was apparent that casting had failed. “McGwire and Sammy Sosa both understood how to behave to make the movie work.” The season was magnificent drama, but “I don’t know who the real Mark McGwire is, and I don’t think he knows anymore.” McGwire himself said in a press conference that the season was better than any movie. 

Since 1998, we’ve learned that McGwire’s “life movie” may have been aided by special effects. We’ve had a White House administration that bragged that it determined what “reality” is, and we’re still at a loss to explain whether some news shows and talk radio hosts are commentators or “entertainers.”

But it’s amazing that Gabler’s comments seem more relevant today than they did 11 years ago. At the time, he admited that his book explained but doesn’t condemn.  “My book is about analysis and trying to understand the process. Then, if you want to arrest the process, that is fine.”

He had predecessors and successors, of course, in writing about our culture’s obsession with entertainment. Some warn that culture is declining; other just describe what’s happening. Do you have any favorite books about this subject? In addition to “Life: The Movie,” here are four other titles:

Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America” (1962). Boorstin explains that press conferences and presidential debates, which are staged solely for publicity, are “pseudo-events” and he redefines celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985). Postman says the ascendancy of TV hurt literate culture, degrading political debate, news, even religion. (Also see Postman’s “The Disappearance of Childhood” and “Technopoly.”)

Todd Gitlin’s “Media Unlimited” (2002). New York University professor examines how the media-saturated world affects people’s emotions, etc.

Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007). This time, the danger lies not so much in TV, but the Internet, which Keen says is “killing our culture.”