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The use of the term “event” covers several realities. The aim of this article is to confront the use the medias make, with what the researchers in social sciences retain. For the journalists, an event is a remarkable fact deserving a special treatment which emphasizes it. For social sciences, it is a phenomenon which is lived like rupture by a collectivity, and which thus engages a search for intelligibility. Are those two logics brought to meet? Is any event recognized ant dealt with like a media event or not? And conversely? To answer these questions, this article determines the conditions of media emergence of one event on an international scale, which we call the eventful reading of the facts. Four conditions are retained: criteria of emotional intensity; the access to the ground and the existence of social actors able to provide an eventful interpretation; the possibility of culturel recoding of the facts; the degree of competition with other facts interpretable as events. Diagrams try to provide a synthesis of the different cases.