The Shots Heard Round the World

“German Tourist Killed in California”

--Tuesday’s 8 o’clock news, German television

The news operates within a fixed equation. Like a law of physics, it functions the same regardless of longitude or weather or time.

If X is the news nucleus--the place where the news is written and read, as well as the people about whom it is written--and Y is anything else--any incident, any place, any person that is not X--then Y is always less than X. Always.

There are variables, though, like distance and self-interest. How far away was Y news from X? Does Y news affect X at all? A plane crashes in Bolivia, and you can put good money on every radio bulletin north of Tijuana announcing, “There were no Americans on board,” or at least, “It isn’t yet known whether there were any Americans on board.” A little girl murdered in a Nevada casino commands more of L.A.’s attention than many little girls murdered in Kosovo.

Roughly, it works like this. X being, let’s say, an Oklahoma TV station, its news coverage of 1,000 Chinese dying in a flood equals that of 100 Greeks killed in a ferry sinking equals that of 10 Englishmen perishing in a mountain-climbing incident equals one Tulsan dead in a road accident.

Deplorable? Perhaps. But not uniquely American, not unique to the news business, and not even, I suspect, uniquely human. It isn’t an invention of the 6 o’clock news. Our own concerns and grievances are always more absorbing than the other guys’.

Before journalism, it was how history was told. Before history, it was how clans and tribes assessed their place in the cosmos. It was only 500 years ago that the powers that be had to admit at last that the sun, not the Earth, stands at the center of the solar system.

Now we have the murder of a 50-year-old German tourist in Santa Monica, killed on an evening stroll behind one of those sun-splashed beach hotels that people daydream about in places like his hometown of Loebau when it’s cold and foggy and winter stretches ahead, gray and endless as the Autobahn.

Today, in the news, here as in Germany, our X and their Y crossed paths.

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Had Horst Fietze been shot in Germany, it would not be news in L.A., might not even be news in Berlin. But now it is a big story, larger even than if it had been some 50-year-old Angeleno swept away in the urban maelstrom.

Why? Here’s a clue: The two sources listed on a news release about the killing were the Santa Monica Police Department--and the Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau. This is not simply about the late Mr. Fietze. His death touches on what will be said about us, what they’ll think of us, in Germany, around the world.

About five years ago, it looked as if tourists would kill off Florida just as Florida had killed the tourists: nine foreign visitors murdered in 11 months. The headlines were big as billboards. The marks and pounds and guilders began staying home, and most appallingly, the German government issued a travel advisory to its citizens about certain parts of Miami--imagine, as if it were Bosnia or Rwanda.

In 1991, Mayor Tom Bradley traveled to Japan to talk up tourism. He took pains to endorse L.A.’s charms, but especially its safety. Those drive-by shootings--the ones generating such alarming bulletins in Japan, whose citizens drop millions of tourist bucks in L.A. every year--only take place “in a limited area,” he promised, and among a limited population, “primarily black or Hispanic gangs.” What the Japanese thought of L.A. was no longer just Y--their concern, their news--but ours too.

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In 1981, a Japanese tourist was fatally shot on a street nine blocks from Parker Center. Her husband, Kazuyoshi Miura, said young men in an old car had shot and robbed them both. From his hospital bed, he railed against this violent city. Remorseful, the LAPD promised to find the killers. The Air Force dispatched a hospital jet to take his comatose wife home to Japan, where she died.

Again, what Japan thought of us was X, local news. We believed our headlines, our capacity for violence. Miura knew that his countrymen believed it too. That is why he chose L.A. as the perfect place to kill his wife--as he was convicted of doing, 13 years later.

By then we were patching up from an earthquake, and still coming to terms with the riots. Kazuyoshi Miura’s guilty verdict was a Metro page curiosity, a frayed loose end, tied up. It wasn’t, thankfully, a story about us anymore; X was still greater than Y.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com