Terrorism is bigtime news -- and terrorists may well find the guarantee of global media attention increasingly irresistible. While no one is seriously proposing that reports of terrorist acts be censored or forbidden, the media should cut back on the sensational reportorial orgies that now accompany acts of terrorism. PNS editor Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist whose books include "Reality Isn't What It Used To Be."

One fact is clear amidst all the question marks still hanging over the explosion of TWA Flight 800 and the Atlanta pipe bomb: terrorism is bigtime news. Whatever the tangle of political or personal motives that inspires a terrorist to act, the expectation of massive media attention is critical.

There is something about being on the road when one of these mega-events happens that dramatizes their reach. In a hotel room in Washington, D.C., I caught the early morning reports of the crash of Flight 800, then surfed the other channels for the rest of the news -- politics, world affairs, business, sports, whatever. There was none to be had. All other news had been put on hold, while every network spent countless hours and millions of dollars sifting through the pitiful trickle of facts that came from the darkness off JFK Airport.

Some ten days later, I was at a conference center in the Canadian Rockies when the news flashed from Atlanta and, again, monopolized the media. Tom Brokaw put on an Olympic event of his own -- a marathon broadcast on the explosion -- and other broadcasters quickly followed suit. Although I had no idea who might be responsible for either event, I couldn't help thinking that this news, this enormous volume of attention, was their reward. The more global the reach of the media becomes and the greater the focus on such events to the exclusion of all else, the richer the payoff for the perpetrator.

Experts who have studied terrorism disagree on many points but agree on one -- the victim of the crime is relatively unimportant. That is what makes it so terrible. As a psychiatrist put it in a congressional hearing some years ago, "the victim is secondary. Death, destruction of property, the flamboyant or dangerous use of technological devices, deprivation of liberty, are not ends of terrorism. They are the means by which to terrorize -- to make an impression on the spectator."

Not just one spectator but millions, even billions, of spectators. The global media have created a global theater, and with a well-placed bomb you can, for a moment, take center stage on it.

Connected to almost every act of terrorism is a political statement but underneath it is a personal statement -- I am somebody. Notice me. the political messages of terrorism tend to be murky and unpersuasive; the instant jolt of personal fame is clear and powerful. The terrorist's real identity may be unknown, but that itself can be a heady kind of fame, as we can see from the Unabomber's long career -- and especially from his attempts to reassert his prominence when he was slipping out of the headlines.

Nobody has seriously proposed that reports of terrorist acts should be censored or forbidden. They are news, and should be reported along with the other news: other deaths -- no less meaningful to the dead and their survivors -- other political statements, even other acts of violence. But the media should cut back on the sensationalistic reportorial orgies that accompany acts of terrorism, that bring so little information to the public yet cooperate so enthusiastically with the terrorists' agendas.