•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

Al Qaeda terrorist network leader Osama bin Laden is so eager to portray himself as a strong and powerful person that when a seasoned Pakistani journalist filmed him walking with the help of a cane he asked him to remove the footage from his video camera.

The journalist, Rahimullah Yusufzai, who was in Jakarta recently, recalled the experience of meeting and interviewing the Al Qaeda leader in 1998, in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Yusufzai told the Jakarta Globe that soon after filming bin Laden using a cane while walking toward the tent where the interview was to be held, an aide asked him to erase the footage because his boss was “very particular about his image and very media savvy.”

“He wants to look healthy, strong and powerful because he’s challenging the superpower," said Yusufzai, who is a writer for The News International, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan.

Yusufzai was speaking at a workshop in Jakarta earlier this month at which attention was focused on the role of the media in covering terrorism and the use of the media by terrorist groups to promote their cause.

In the case of the Taliban, Yusufzai said they realized the power of the media to help them disseminate information.

He said it came as no surprise that despite “abusing media freedom and censoring everything” while in power, the Taliban now criticized the Afghan government for banning live television coverage in a bid to deny the insurgents a platform.

“Now that’s strange,” Yusufzai said. “They were against taking pictures but now the Taliban themselves make videos to be used for the media.”

Waleed Aly, a lecturer in politics at Australia’s Monash University, told the Globe the terrorists were able to get their message across when their attacks were covered by the media.

“It’s one of the best ways. They’re definitely media savvy,” Aly said, adding that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington were a good example of that.

He said journalists and media outlets, being the messengers, had to decide what aspects of terrorist attacks to report.

“A terrorist attack does not really work without media coverage, so merely by reporting it, journalists are creating the event,” Aly said.

Ibnu Hamad, a communications and media professor at the University of Indonesia, said on Thursday the media could not help but report terrorist attacks since they were so newsworthy.

“From a journalistic aspect, it would be wrong not to report the events,” Ibnu said, adding that what media people must keep in mind was how they framed the report to avoid channeling the terrorists’ perspective.

He said ideally the reports should focus on the victims’ point of view and the escalating danger that the attack created.

“They can also frame the news to get across the damage the attacks have caused,” Ibnu said.

“The media must try to draw out the public’s antipathy to terrorists acts by showing them through the eyes of the victims and how their attacks have affected the victims in particular and the country in general.”

The reports, he added, should avoid linking the acts with a certain faith or group to avoid generating sympathy.

Ibnu gave as an example a report on the burial of Dulmatin, a key terrorist slain during a police raid in Tangerang earlier this month, that was colored with phrases indicating that he died as a martyr for his cause.

“Reports should take the side of public interest instead of the terrorists,” he said.

But media analyst Arya Gunawan slammed the press, saying “most media rely on police facts and few are critical of the police version of a terrorist atack.”

Arya criticized the media for not trying to challenge the police justification for always shooting terrorist suspects rather than capturing them alive.

“It is the police who have been using the media as their platform to clean up their tarnished image,” he said.