Never did a single story monopolize so much mass-media oxygen for so long. There was nothing like this, for instance, after North Korea seized the merchant ship the USS Pueblo in 1968, killing one crew member, starving the rest and torturing them with mock firing squads, holding them for eleven months. American diplomats were held for more than a year in China in 1949 with hardly any publicity at all. But those ordeals had not starred street frenzies that
