A MILLION ORDINARY DEAD PEOPLE IS A STATISTIC, BUT THE DEATH OF ONE OF US IS A TRAGEDY

To explain why the death of Jamal Khashoggi has inspired much greater outrage than, say, the cruelties of the war in Yemen, Max Fisher of The New York Times turns to a familiar quote attributed to Stalin:

Any reporter who has covered a humanitarian disaster should understand what Stalin is once reported to have said to a fellow Soviet official: The death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of one million is a statistic.

... It is not easy to wrap one’s mind around thousands of deaths. It becomes an abstraction of geopolitics, economics, conflict dynamics — of statistics.

But a single death can be understood in the more relatable terms of, say, a grieving father or a desperate spouse. Or a murdered journalist, like Mr. Khashoggi.

Yes, but if one death is a tragedy, why did the media single this one out? I think the answer is obvious: The elite media focused on Khashoggi because he's one of their own, not just a columnist but a columnist for one of America's prestige newspapers. I'm not sure the broad general public was clamoring for saturation coverage of this story -- it was a choice made by editors in American journalism's upper reaches because it involved a colleague. The general public might be interested now because the specifics of the assassination are so gruesome and lurid. But even now I don't think the story matters as much to the average American as it does to the press.

I also suspect that, for the press, Mohammed bin Salman is serving as a proxy for President Trump -- not just because the Trump family has significant ties to Saudi Arabia, but because Trump is waging a war on the press in America. I think many journalists have been expecting Trump's anti-media campaign to turn violent, whether at the hands of one of his supporters or -- although this still seems like a line Trump won't cross yet -- in the form of a campaign of physical intimidation launched from the White House. In America we're not there yet, but here's a head of state who's a Trump crony killing a journalist who was a U.S. resident. That's close.

It's good that we're paying attention to this story. It's causing America to question the usual U.S. deference to the Saudis. Also, it might be drawing more attention to the corruption of the Trump family. (However, I think most ordinary Americans believe that every plutocrat does dodgy things, and, really, how can you not when the laws are so complicated and everyone else you're dealing with has dubious morals? That's why I think the big New York Times story about Trump's money was a dud -- that and the fact that the dodges and ruses described in the story were complex and difficult to understand.)

I'd like this story to matter. To most Americans, I don't think it will. I think in the end we'll be pretty much where we were in relation to the Saudis, and the public still won't care much about that or about Trump family corruption. But I could be wrong, and it's worth pursuing the story, even if journalists care mostly because one of their own was the target.