It will be a shared media experience.  This tragedy exemplifies the power of video images. In our global village, we share shock, horror and grief at the tragedies we witness, natural and manmade. Some cause us to be disgusted, such as the freedom fighters gunned down in Libya. Some cause us to open our wallets to donate money, such as helping victims of the Haiti earthquake last year.  Over the past few decades, the world has enjoyed, or been repulsed by, several shared media experiences, some of which helped to chart the course of history:  -- 2001: The second jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center and the subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers into a massive cloud of dust, visible for miles.  -- 1991: Boris Yeltsin scrambling atop a tank in the midst of chaos in front of the Russian Parliament building and bellowing through a bullhorn, "The clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night."  -- 1984: Emaciated children dying in their mothers' arms in an Ethiopian feeding center, images that my organization, World Vision, helped two journalists to capture. One of the two, Mohammed Amin of Kenya, later commented, "The subject was so horrifying and brutal ... it hit me very hard that it was more than another story."  Indeed, those three events and many more are "more than another story."  Steven Livingston, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, writes: "Television [and I would add the Internet news sites], for a variety of commercial and professional reasons, is drawn to the dramatic visuals found in most -- but not all -- humanitarian emergencies. The pitched battles between gun-toting teenagers in the streets of some hitherto unheard-of place, massive flows of refugees, the pathos of a starving child, all make for compelling television."
Twenty-foot walls of water. Ships, cars and houses swept away in a raging, debris-strewn mass. One man rescued from atop the roof of his home after three days spent miles out into the ocean.These