Part of it is just coverage. Coverage on the news appears to be a prerequisite for large scale outrage, although it also doesn't appear to be sufficient. The ve

Part of it is just coverage. Coverage on the news appears to be a prerequisite for large scale outrage, although it also doesn't appear to be sufficient. The very nature of who was murdered, a journalist, has made it much easier for other journalists to talk about this a lot. That some of them knew the victim certainly reinforces this. Hence the coverage and hence the outrage. The other thing that's fascinated me for a while is the breaking point for certain regimes or systems. Regimes can survive decades of abuse, but when the breaking point arrives it's never what you think it would be. The large scale Arab Spring revolt was triggered, as best we can tell, by the public suicide of a harassed street vendor (Mohamed Bouazizi). A tragic story for certain, but a surprisingly small trigger when compared to the decades of abuse and conflict in the region. With that framework in place, it would not surprise me one bit if something like a murdered journalist is the straw that breaks the camel's back in the relations between Saudi and the west. Set against the backdrop of 9/11, persistent human rights abuses, and staggering civilian deaths in Yemen, one journalist is a very small drop of blood in a large ocean. But that's how these things go sometimes.