Terrorism Is Not an American Event

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The formula is quite simple: the bigger the media pack, the tighter the world's focus on a particular event, the smaller the actual bomb has to be. Thus a primitive pipe-bomb in a knapsack that caused two deaths at the Olympics in Atlanta gets as much global coverage as the vastly bigger and more sophisticated explosive device that probably brought down TWA's Flight 800 from New York earlier this month and killed 230 people.

It's just a slight re-working of the old newspaperman's adage about "news values." The New York version goes: "one dead New York cop is as newsworthy as a dozen raped Irish nuns or a thousand Chinese peasants drowned in a flood." In Beijing, the list …