Terror and bathos.

TERROR IN AMERICA! This was the teaser for a week-long series intended to increase audience share for Good Morning America. "Is the United States itself a terrorist target?" panted John McLaughlin. Tune in to his next show to find out.

CNN anchors, new members of the Time-Warner "family," hawked Time's latest terrorism issue on the air. With the Centennial Park bombing, hyperbole ran amok--the bomb "blew a hole in the Olympic spirit" and turned the park "from an oasis to a desert"--as CNN sought to lure a portion of the vast Olympics audience away from NBC.

Terrorism may be awful for America, but it's great for the news industry, especially if it's properly hyped.

In the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 disaster and the bombing in Centennial Park, millions of us are stroking our children's hair, greeting our neighbors, and admiring summer sunsets with an intensified sense of the fragility of our lives and those of our loved ones. Of course, we want to know who killed all these people, and why, and we want to see the perpetrators in handcuffs.

So we turn ourselves over to the press to get the very latest. Some of the coverage has been thoughtful and restrained. But when we have a news media saturated with entertainment values, the pressure to turn these disasters into on-the-spot, made-for-TV movies becomes overwhelming. To snare as big an audience as possible, the media shamelessly played on our emotions, which are already pretty ragged, thank you very much.

This same pressure led to an obnoxious intrusion into the bomb investigations. The rescue teams, including many that have worked on other grisly air disasters, report that they have never been so pressured to produce speedy, irrefutable results for the news media. The accusation that the bodies weren't being retrieved quickly enough--exploited for political gain by New York's grandstanding governor, George Pataki--may compromise the salvaging of debris bearing critical forensic evidence.

By now, the violence in the media and the onslaught of one cheap-thrill disaster movie after another have so affected news coverage of real events that it's almost impossible to tell one from another. What's more, our own expectations about solving such crimes have been colored beyond the pale.

How much have movies featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis or even James Bond stunted our capacity to bear real uncertainty and the pace of real investigations occurring in real time? Can we sympathize with real-life divers whose work is tedious, painstaking, and truly dangerous? And since, on the big screen, we get to learn who the villain is early on, and see him foiled so quickly, we expect that to happen on CNN, too, and we get frustrated when it doesn't.

The insistent finger-pointing on This Week With David Brinkley exemplified the manic, unreasonable rush to find someone, anyone, to blame when a sociopath commits a nearly unpreventable crime. Bill Campbell, the mayor of Atlanta, gracefully withstood all sorts of charges from Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson that authorities hadn't adequately screened the nearly 200 terrorist threats they had received, and that no one official or agency was really in charge of security in Atlanta. "What more are you doing to prevent more terrorist attacks?" demanded Roberts, as if all risk can be eliminated.

The most deranged take on Flight 800 was offered by John McLaughlin and Time magazine. And you shouldn't be surprised by the culprit: Hillary! See, the FAA was going to issue a warning to the American public about the security problems at the Athens airport. But the White House allegedly sought to quash this, because the Clinton Administration didn't want Hillary to get a cool reception when she went to Athens to witness the lighting of the Olympic torch. Never mind that security at Hellenicon has been a problem for years, that several Congressmen, including Republicans, also sought to suppress the warning because of their Greek-American constituents, or that the warning was issued anyway, one week before Hillary's trip. Why doesn't McLaughlin just dye his hair chartreuse and rename his show Warped As I Wanna Be?

The mirror image of the bombing coverage has been the coverage of the Olympics--a bathetic orgy of nationalism. Here Americans are the best, the only ones who matter, the ones with guts and heart.

The commercials for UPS, International Paper, AT&T, and McDonald's set the tone: Flying doves, crying grandmas, and athletes capable of diving into Victoria Falls identify American corporations as the agents of world peace, altruism, and individual transcendence.

For an athlete to be featured in one of NBC's nauseating, honey-hued profiles, he or she has to have endured a major car accident, an emergency appendectomy aboard a runaway train, the death of one or both parents, a crippling depression, or a shattered coccyx. In one of Dick Enberg's revolting "moments," we heard about athletes who "train at 4:00 A.M. while staring at the American flag," whose "hearts are openly exposed" (yuck), and who are "not motivated by any financial gain."

If Americans aren't featured prominently in a sport, hey, why cover it? And it's been key to remind viewers every time the Chinese or the Russians screw up.

Pandering to jingoism may help sell the news and the Olympics. But it is this inflated and parochial patriotism, this wallowing in cheap and easy emotions, this sense of entitlement, that blinds our understanding of the rest of the world and distorts our place in it.