Deaths Become Numbers

The amount of deaths after 9/11 meant that finding tragedy in each individual death would be nearly impossibly; the news network showed only a sample of the people grieving afterwards.
Therefore the amount of deaths became easy to understand numbers; around 3000 died on 9/11 (around 2970 if I recall) or 3000 American soldiers are dead in Iraq or 1/2 a million Iraqis have died, etc. It is not only the indiscriminate nature of the attacks, but the arbitrariness of the deaths too.
This is where the television dramas took over. They followed the stories of people, and every deaths mattered again(as death of characters generally do in serials). 24's creators have always insisted that Jack Bauer may always die and he was not immune from the many deaths in the show, they did this surely to reflect 9/11's huge amount of indiscriminate deaths.
Battlestar Galactica takes this numbering idea to the extreme by using the number of human survivors as a part of the plot. Initially the number was simply shown within the narrative of the show, but as the show progressed it started putting the number of survivors straight up front (this change could be attributed to two things, that the chaos and panic from 9/11 had long since passed and the number was now more official and somewhat more distant. Also, it may be due to the developments of the war in Iraq, during which many news programs were displaying a continuously updating number of American fatalities in Iraq).
TV dramas were somewhat the antithesis to the cold hard truth of the impersonal numbers of dead, as they are able to mourn for the important people and completely bypass the mourning or depression when a mass amount of relatively faceless people die (for example a whole ship with thousands of people of may be destroyed in Battlestar Galactica or a nuke can explode in Los Angeles in 24 yet neither one will stop to grieve the thousands of dead in the way that was done after 9/11).