{"id":6737,"date":"2011-05-09T08:22:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T04:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=6737"},"modified":"2011-05-11T09:04:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-11T05:04:17","slug":"bin-laden-a-study-in-news-management-excellence-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/showcase\/bin-laden-a-study-in-news-management-excellence-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Bin Laden: A Study in News Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It is inevitable that the capture and killing of the world\u2019s most wanted terrorist should have developed into the news story of the century.<\/p>\n

What is less obvious is that the killing and its immediate aftermath were minutely choreographed with public opinion and the media clearly driving the US agenda.<\/p>\n

The Osama bin Laden story has everything: US special forces operating in the dead of night\u00a0 in another country\u2019s jurisdiction and, apparently without that country\u2019s permission;\u00a0 a \u2018hidden\u2019 \u00a0village fortress that, according to Pakistani intelligence was raided in 2003 and then \u2018fell off the radar\u2019\u2019;\u00a0 the world\u2019s no 1 terrorist living a more or less normal existence with his family just moments from Pakistani military academy; accusations and counter-accusations of how much the Pakistani authorities knew; and how bin Laden\u2019s presence in a luxury villa just two hours\u2019 drive from the country\u2019s capital remained undetected for years.<\/p>\n

Ignoring the obvious lapses in intelligence and alleged \u2018leakiness\u2019 of the ISI, Pakistan\u2019s secret intelligence service, that resulted first in bin Laden\u2019s escape from US special forces in 2001, and secondly, had him holed up in a cave on the Afghanistan\/Pakistan border when – if the recent news reports are accurate \u2013 he was, in fact, living in relative comfort and had been doing so since 2005\/6, the bin Laden killing has been a study in news management excellence.<\/p>\n

From the moment that President Obama alerted the world\u2019s news media to an important announcement, and then kept them waiting for two hours before delivering it, it was clear that whatever the story, it was going to lead the world\u2019s news for days.<\/p>\n

Bin Laden\u2019s immediate burial at sea was a masterstroke. It removed at once the oxygen of publicity a funeral or burial would have provided, still less deprived his followers of a shrine or rallying point for protests and from which to announce reprisals. No martyr\u2019s shrine, no photos, no TV footage glorifying his memory for eternity on the Internet to radicalise the next generation of Islamic fundamentalists.<\/p>\n

This provided the cue for the world\u2019s conspiracy theorists to imply a CIA plot designed to bolster flagging domestic ratings for President Obama. No body, therefore no dead bin Laden. Instead, it was left to a small caucus of advisers \u2013 and Obama himself in an interview with CNN\u00a0 \u2013 to control this most sensitive of issues: to ratify that they had seen images of the body and to confirm it was bin Laden.<\/p>\n

The reported became reporters of one of the world\u2019s most dramatic news stories \u2013 and who was going to doubt the word of the President of the United States of America on such an issue and then voice it publicly?<\/p>\n

The President\u2019s media advisors also clearly recognized the outpourings of grief and promises of retaliation that would follow publication of photos of bin Laden\u2019s corpse. The decision not to publish must have been taken at the planning stages. However, the \u2018will they, won\u2019t they publish\u2019 debate was allowed to run and dominated the news, within the news, for a full two days before the decision was taken not to publish the \u2018gruesome\u2019 image.<\/p>\n

This neatly holed the conspiracy theorists\u2019 case: acknowledge at the very highest political level that photos exist to prove bin Laden\u2019s identity and death, then trump it with the argument for non-publication on the grounds of public decency and taste<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even the BBC\u2019s Washington correspondent, Mark Mardell, was moved to note in one of his reports how adroitly the US administration had trod the line between triumphalism and glee at bin Laden\u2019s death and the need for sensitivity in case of inflaming Muslim opinion.<\/p>\n

Today, nearly five days after the killing of bin Laden, President Obama\u2019s administration is basking in the plaudits. Public opinion is with them and a US feel\u00a0 good factor at the clinical decisiveness of the Abbottabad operation and the diplomatic handling of its aftermath is there for all to see.<\/p>\n

One wonders if the air-punching, gung-ho approach of previous US administrations would have prompted considerably more anti-US rhetoric and demonstrations than the isolated incidents of flag-burning to date.<\/p>\n

Only time can tell whether bin Laden\u2019s death \u2013 coming just shy of the symbolic 10th<\/sup> anniversary of 9\/11 and the potential for further gloating by Al Qaeda \u2013\u00a0 will prove to be President Obama\u2019s \u2018Falklands Factor\u2019 that ensured a second term for Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister on a wave of patriotic goodwill 30 years ago.<\/p>\n

But there can be no doubt that, in the space of a week, a US President frequently accused of weakness and indecision has, in the eyes of the watching world, been transformed into the man of the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANDREW MACKAY: Even the BBC\u2019s Washington correspondent noted how adroitly the US administration had trod the line between triumphalism and glee at bin Laden\u2019s death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":6751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,82,60],"tags":[6713,24,169,2064,1376,3182,322,6766,18280,2091,121,583,359,6626,1808,2204,18337,18302,6760,6763,2020],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}