It’s all in how you take the news

Hours after the bombings in London, the story was being made local, with KTLA and Fox 11’s morning gabfest “Good Day L.A.” dispatching reporters to MetroRail stations.

“What people are telling me is, it’s actually making them a little terrified here,” Nischelle Turner reported from Hollywood, as B-roll of mostly empty subway stations flashed by.

It was almost a sweet gesture -- the notion that the psychic trauma of the millions who use the London Underground was being felt all the way to Los Angeles, where far fewer ride the subway.

But terrorist attacks, even more than global music concerts, promote a sense of solidarity now on TV. Even Fox News Channel, shamelessly obsessed in recent weeks with the ratings-friendly case of Natalee Holloway, missing in Aruba, gave over bits of time to Britain’s Sky News.

On MSNBC, a reassuring face from 9/11 appeared. “This is a psychological war as much as it is an actual war,” former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told anchor Lester Holt. “And part of the psychology is to create chaos. The people of London resisted that today.”

Giuliani happened to be in London on Thursday, and Holt couldn’t resist terming his interview with him an “exclusive” as he teased it into a commercial.

On American TV, the story of the bombings was mostly intertwined with updates on security measures being taken here, which may be inevitable given the scars of 9/11 and the airborne catastrophic fears since then.

But the pace and tone of American TV news itself have a way of stoking vague fears, especially in the way a chaotic jumble of information is thrown at you. So it was instructive to turn to BBC America, where the news anchors look like it’s less of a stretch for them to respond quickly and appropriately when serious world events turn local.

On the BBC you saw interviews with bloodied and dazed commuters, but there was also a sense of sobriety about the day’s events. Even the raw feed from a picture phone used by a commuter -- introducing itself as a device in breaking news TV coverage -- didn’t come off as sensationalized.

The tone of BBC coverage could be described, finally, as adult. I didn’t hear the word “exclusive,” for example, even as they broadcast an interview with an injured passenger just released from the hospital.

To watch the BBC handle this crisis was to sense a network not nearly so paranoid as its American counterparts that the viewer might be about to switch the channel, surfing for better video.