It’s wonderful that our country has come together in this time, at least as much as such a large society is capable of.

We unite through the news, where we see horrific images that illicit wide-eyed “did you hear the latest”s around the water cooler from foreign corners of the office. We are one in our fear. We are one in our pain. We are one in our reverence of CNN.

Don’t get me wrong. As a member of the media, I understand the importance of the dissemination of information. It’s the way that information is being disseminated that’s beginning to disgust me. This, coming from someone with no TV, who’s only seen snippets of the coverage at friends’ houses and at work.

“America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh appeared on Fox last Sunday evening, and his treatment of the information he delivered was disturbing, to say the least. Sensationalism is a word that’s thrown around quite a bit these days, and I think if he was trying to give it a little more weight, he did a good job.

Caked with enough makeup to make a L’Oreal rep gag, Walsh furrowed and feigned his brow with concern while bellowing in the most dramatic voice he could muster, throwing his arms forward as if guided by a puppeteer. It seemed like a twisted joke, as he presented graphic details about the attacks as if it was another edition of “World’s Wildest Police Chases.” Only he wasn’t talking about Jed’s drunken mad-dash to escape a pot rap.

He was talking about an event so grave that it defies our comprehension. We’ve come to refer to it as “everything that’s happened” or “the tragedy,” for lack of more appropriate words to describe last week’s events. We liken the events to movies because in our cushy, sheltered American lives we have nothing else with which to compare them.

CNN continues its constant coverage, along with any and every other media outlet imaginable. It’s on every Web site, TV channel, in every newspaper and magazine. Of course — the world has permanently changed and that must be covered.

It seems that with so many media outlets vying for viewer attention in the coverage of one subject, they are stretching the limits of good taste. I can just see CNN’s marketing and

design people, ties flying over their shoulders last Tuesday morning as they ran to their offices, scrambling to write what would become a notorious tagline … “America’s New War.” In big, bold letters, the tag stands proud and tall, like a soldier, declaring for all that CNN is the news authority.

We already respect CNN as a news authority. We don’t need the flashy graphics to tell us that.

Or do we?

Do we really need the cheesy music to feel empathy for the victims?

This thin veil of sensation is a sad sign. It reads: “Sugar-coat our grief. Give us visuals. Give us sound-effects. Give us our movie, and we just might conjure up some soul.”

Our chests are puffed-up with the intrinsic pride of having been born American. We stand aligned against our evil foes, ready to fight in the name of freedom, not just for Americans, but for the world over.

At least this is the shiny, pristine facade of patriotism that’s infiltrated our society of late.

Our expressions of patriotism may seem to be a separate issue from the media’s coverage of the recent tragedy.

But really, they revert to the same notion — that we really have no notion of what’s happening. It’s a movie. It’s a bad dream. It boils down to some graphic flags and a series of talking heads.

How many of us who are cheering on a war are actually going to go fight it? What kind of war is it going to be? How many of us who are in college can even comprehend the reality of war?

I know I can’t. I don’t think even the most graphic accounts in film or print could drive home the truth.

My words can’t either, because that is the nature of war. It cannot be honored with words. As a journalism student, I have been taught to revere the power in the written word. But this is one subject that words cannot dignify.

Flashy graphics and saccharin music most certainly cannot either — they only serve the opposite end.