For half a century, we've been watching rituals of retribution. Countless entertainment shows on TV have presented certain vengeance as dramatic justice. In time for the last commercial, the designated bad guys got what was coming to them.

McVeigh's crime, we're told, was the deadliest act of terrorism ever on U.S. soil. Among the 168 people he killed were 19 young children. From prison, he insisted on describing the kids he murdered as "collateral damage." It's a phrase that disturbed some media consumers a decade ago, during the Gulf War, when it was the euphemism of choice for top Pentagon officials and many American reporters.

In a statement to a Fox News Channel correspondent, McVeigh said: "Collateral damage? As an American news junkie, a military man, and a Gulf War veteran, where do they think I learned that?"

Unrepentant and preferring to undergo capital punishment sooner rather than later, McVeigh declined to appeal his death sentence, a move that would have delayed his execution for years. He expressed no remorse about setting off a bomb at the federal building in Oklahoma City. Explaining his motives to the authors of a new biography, McVeigh commented: "I did it for the larger good." With more diplomatic language, that's the sort of remark that U.S. officials frequently made during the Gulf War.

If McVeigh were black or brown instead of white -- and if he had grown accustomed to the idea of inflicting lethal violence as a member of a gang instead of as a member of the U.S. Army -- it's a safe bet that news media would have flooded us with feature reports, analysis and commentaries about the inner-city culture of violence and pathology that produced him. But in McVeigh's case, we're made to understand that he was a bad apple in a wholesome barrel overseen by Uncle Sam. The good apples, the ones we can all be proud of, understood that killing is laudable only when authorized.

It was authorized in Terre Haute. During the days before his execution in that Indiana city, T-shirts with his face on them were selling briskly. A simple message was printed on those souvenir shirts: "Die, die, die."

Long ago, Bertrand Russell observed: "The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly, I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses."

If "we," ostensibly represented by the state, are going to kill with premeditated executions, then we may as well see the grisly results. But why stop there?

A lot of babies perish due to social conditions that could be prevented by a shift in government priorities. For the first time in a quarter-century, the latest annual figures tell us, infant mortality rates have not dropped in the United States -- remaining at 7.2 infants per 1,000 births. Meanwhile, the Children's Defense Fund says, 10.8 million of the nation's children are lacking health insurance.

Unfortunately, there's no media frenzy to cover what happens when the state, in effect, routinely kills many Americans simply by inaction -- not enforcing workplace-safety rules, or not reducing air pollution that menaces people chronically short of breath, or not providing health care for the uninsured.

With the corporate-dominated state functioning as a serial killer every day, news outlets should shine a bright light on its innocent victims.
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Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media." His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.