So that’s what success looks like.  Hard news has been so weighed down with political rancor, government stalemate, military losses and economic hardship that it’s hard to remember the last time an American president presented viewers with an unmitigated triumph.  “They got the job done,” is how President Obama put it on Monday, praising the commandos who killed Osama bin Laden in his high-end hideaway in Pakistan. Mr. Obama was presiding over a ceremony for Korean War Medal of Honor winners, which wouldn’t ordinarily be covered in full by cable news networks, but this was different. Cameras wanted to linger on the commander in chief who announced that “the world is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden.”  As word spread on Sunday night and networks went live for Mr. Obama’s address to the nation, exhilarated anchors framed the raid on the Bin Laden compound as a “historic breakthrough,” a “signature moment” and as David Gregory said on NBC, something so momentous that people will always remember where they were when they first heard the news.  But the raid was also a thrilling, clear-cut and efficient operation, the kind of kill that most people know only from shows like “The Unit” and “24” or, in the case of younger audiences, combat video games like Socom 4.  For a long time and particularly since Sept. 11, 2001, viewers have become accustomed to watching disasters unfold as they do in apocalyptic movies like “Independence Day.” Even combat successes on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are veined with tragic injury and death. Plenty of Americans still recall the day in April 1980 when a crushed President Jimmy Carter went on television to announce the failed attempt to rescue Iranian hostages, a Delta Force raid gone wrong that left eight servicemen dead.  This was a daring, high-stakes raid that worked, and didn’t cost American lives.  Especially for those who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, the killing of Bin Laden was payback long denied for the worst terrorist attack on American soil. But in a gloomy, politically fraught landscape, the operation also provided a rare burst of communal good feeling that some celebrated with flash-mob demonstrations at ground zero, the White House and Times Square, among other places. It turns out that Twitter and Facebook messages weren’t enough — quite a few people wanted to be with other celebrants and to feel good news full-on, the way Egyptians celebrated Hosni Mubarak’s fall or the way Britons turned out to fete the royal wedding couple.  The crowds of Americans waving flags and singing the national anthem looked almost retro, like clips of V-E Day in 1945. Kids chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.” on streets and college campuses, on the other hand, looked more like fans celebrating an Olympic gold medal.  The operation itself looked high-tech on television, where networks recreated the raid with computer animation, colorful graphics and satellite maps. The Pentagon didn’t release photographs right away, so the only grisly images were a few brief glimpses inside the compound on ABC News. The camera pans ransacked rooms, unmade beds, children’s toys and pools of blood on the floor, but no bodies, violence or gunfire.  And even that was different from the capture in 2003 of Saddam Hussein, who was filmed being dragged out of a hole in the ground. The fallen tyrant was even shown submitting passively, his hair tangled and matted, as a doctor in surgical gloves checked him for lice. He was a piteous, pathetic spectacle in defeat; his execution by hanging in 2006, still on YouTube, was just as bizarre and disturbing.  Hussein was a hated foe, but he wasn’t public enemy No. 1, the mastermind behind Sept. 11.  “Americans are united again,” Carol Costello said on CNN on Monday. “Osama bin Laden’s death brought us together in a way we haven’t experienced since the days of 9/11.”  There was rapture on Fox News about Bin Laden’s death, but the praise for Mr. Obama was a little more grudging. The Fox News contributor Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, maintained that credit should go to Mr. Obama’s predecessor, who put a premium on interrogation methods that may have provided bits of intelligence critical to Sunday’s operation. “The tools that President Bush put into place,” Mr. Rove said, “obviously served his successor well.” (In other words, it’s Obama’s economy, and it’s Obama’s war, but this is Bush’s raid.)  And for once, not much was heard from Donald Trump. That might be because word of an urgent White House announcement drove NBC to pre-empt the ending of Mr. Trump’s reality show “Celebrity Apprentice” just minutes before his “You’re fired” climax. It is not often that real life trumps Mr. Trump’s reality. Some of the president’s aides would consider that collateral justice.
News of Osama Bin Ladenâs death sent Americans to their television screens like nothing since... the royal wedding two days before. Alessandra Stanley was watching.